The medication generation: have antidepressants made young people 'emotionally illiterate'?

Katherine Sharpe is the author of "Coming of Age on Zoloft," recently published by Harper Perennial.

The school psychiatrist didn't suggest talk therapy. She simply asked that I return for a "med check" every few weeks to make sure that the pills were working.

Young people are medicated even more aggressively now, and intervention often starts younger. In children, as in adults, antidepressants and medications for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are often used continuously for years. These trends have produced a novel but fast-growing group young people who have known themselves longer on medication than off it.

Finally, there are the consequences of teaching young people to think about their problems in biomedical terms. In the past 25 years, antidepressants have helped to move us from a culture that viewed emotional problems as products of personal psychology, to one that views at least many negative feelings in terms of faulty biologya chemical imbalance.

Read more about young people raised on antidepressants on The Wall Street Journal.