Framing's Influence on Maternal Acceptability of Off-Label Risperdal in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Treatment

This study used framing techniques to assess whether a prescriber’s description of drug treatment influences female caregivers’ acceptability of a psychotropic prescribed to help manage their child’s attention-deficit/hyperactive disorder (ADHD) symptoms. Framing is a rhetorical construct that may explain why individuals alter decisions when changes are made to the presentation of information. Mental health professionals have recently started prescribing second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs), like Risperdal, to ADHD youth without the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval. This off-label prescribing trend is increasingly becoming common practice despite variability in knowledge regarding pediatric SGA use. Therefore, caregivers seeking medication for their child may not realize that the FDA has not approved SGAs for ADHD treatment and may accept this intervention option out of confusion caused by prescribers’ use of intentional or unintentional framing techniques. This study a) investigated whether two informational videos (i.e., experimental or control conditions) and three framed vignettes (i.e., Risperdal framed as a mood stabilizer, an antipsychotic, or a psychiatric drug) significantly influenced female caregivers’ (n = 163) acceptability of Risperdal (risperidone); b) assessed differences in the dissipation rates of significant framing effects within the post-test sample (n = 26) that completed the Treatment Evaluation Inventory-Short Form (TEI-SF) at 2 and 4 weeks post-initial exposure to the randomly assigned information video and framed vignette conditions; and c) explored whether two selected demographic factors (i.e., caregiver’s education level; child’s ADHD status) and reported parenting stress (i.e., Parenting Stress Scale [PSS] score) moderated the relationship between significant predictors and female caregivers’ reported acceptability. Results suggest that the randomly assigned information video condition significantly affected female caregivers’ acceptability of Risperdal within ...