By Rachel D. Egan, PMHNP-BC
It’s been a common theme I’ve run into in the past few weeks with several adolescent clients. Parents come in and their child has been prescribed one or more psychotropic medications, in addition to a vitamin or two. When I ask about medication compliance, parents typically respond “well, we always get the meds in because we know those are important, but it’s hard to have him take so many things, so we aren’t that great about the supplements.
It’s easy to fall into this trap of prioritization. It’s also often not emphasized clearly enough to parents the implications of missing supplements if they have been added in response to low levels of nutrients.
For example, vitamin D is involved in the synthesis of serotonin. If your child is taking a medicine like an SSRI, which is supposed to work on serotonin in the brain, but they are not making enough serotonin to begin with, that medicine won’t be able to do it’s job well.
Furthermore, studies have shown that in post-mortems of clients who died by suicide, there was a high incidence of low vitamin D levels (study linked below).
There is not a medication I can prescribe that I can promise will reduce your child’s likelihood of suicide without causing any side effects. But, if your child has low levels of vitamin D, supplementing them back up to a good level will do just that.
It is always important to work with informed medical professionals around addition and monitoring of supplements. You should not add supplements, especially fat soluble vitamins like vitamin D, which can become too high if take longterm.
