A Patient Bill of Rights for Psychotropic Prescription: A Call for a Higher Standard of Care

The pharmaceutical industry has made it very difficult to know what the clinical trial evidence actually is regarding psychotropics. Consequently, primary care physicians and other front-line practitioners are at a disadvantage when attempting to adhere to the ethical and scientific mandates of evidence based prescriptive practice. This article calls for a higher standard of prescriptive care derived from a risk/benefit analysis of clinical trial evidence. The authors assert that current prescribing practices are often empirically unsound and unduly influenced by pharmaceutical company interests, resulting in unnecessary risks to patients. In the spirit of evidenced based medicine’s inclusion of patient values as well as the movement toward health home and integrated care, we present a patient bill of rights for psychotropic prescription. We then offer guidelines to raise the bar of care equal to the available science for all prescribers of psychiatric medications.