I'm pretty sure antipsychotics have a warning re: use in patients with dementia, as in don't use them. Here's an example: Risperdal. Just death as a side effect, via heart attack or pneumonia. I wonder what age the cut off for that blackbox warning is? I always wondered what the difference is between a 20something with Dementia and a say, 62 yr.old early onset Alzheimers patient. In my opinion this warning is age appropriate for all ages, and now wonder why it's approved for autistic kids.

I hope you noticed that more than half of the people who started the study couldn't finish -- of course they don't tell us why but let's just guess the drugs might have been making them feel pretty uncomfortable. Let's also remember that Risperdal at small doses acts like an SSRI -- The Last Psychiatrist was brilliant at explaining this (sorry I don't know how to do hyperlinks) and last, but not least, all the people in the study were allowed to have up to 2mg of Ativan per day "as needed". So what can we really tell from this study? I say -- nothing without a lot more anecdotal information about what was really going on with individual patients. And this was peer reviewed and published. And these guys are being paid to do this "research". It boggles the mind. To conclude on the basis of this that an SSRI acts as an antipsychotic is silly -- the patients who stuck with it probably felt like they'd been hit over the head with a sledge hammer and, yes, that is one way to stop psychosis and agitation and just about everything else.

What Sara said! ditto it.