May 8, 2026 – The Long Term Care Community Coalition (LTCCC) today released new, facility-level data on antipsychotic (AP) drugging in U.S. nursing homes, highlighting both the continuing prevalence of antipsychotic use and disturbing limitations in the publicly available federal data.

Antipsychotic drugs are powerful medications associated with increased risks of stroke, falls, Parkinsonism, and death when used in older adults with dementia. Importantly, they are not clinically indicated for the treatment of behavioral or personality changes sometimes associated with dementia.

Despite federal rules prohibiting the use of chemical restraints for staff convenience, these drugs continue to be widely used in nursing homes. Recent federal investigations by the HHS Office of Inspector General found that nursing homes continued to administer antipsychotic drugs to residents with dementia to control behavior and, in some cases, improperly diagnosed residents with schizophrenia to mask the misuse of antipsychotic drugs. As a major 2021 investigation in The New York Times reported, nursing homes have a strong incentive to improperly diagnose residents with schizophrenia because residents with that diagnosis are excluded from the facility’s publicly reported antipsychotic drugging rates.

To address concerns that too many nursing homes conceal their true antipsychotic drugging rates by giving elderly residents false schizophrenia diagnoses, LTCCC’s new data report provides two sets of numbers side-by-side for each nursing home:

  1. The “ACTUAL” (non-risk-adjusted) antipsychotic drugging rates for all residents by category: overall, short-stay, and long-stay and
  2. The “RISK-ADJUSTED” antipsychotic drugging rates for short-stay and long-stay residents.

Unfortunately, due to CMS data suppression policies, large portions of the non-risk-adjusted facility-level data are unavailable to the public and therefore do not appear in the new report. Under current CMS policy, data are suppressed whenever the number of residents in a reported category falls between 1 and 10, purportedly for privacy reasons. As a result, the actual antipsychotic drugging rates for many nursing homes cannot be fully evaluated. For example, if a facility has 50 long-stay residents and 40 are not receiving antipsychotic drugs, the entire long-stay antipsychotic dataset may be suppressed because the number of residents receiving the drugs falls between 1 and 10.

“These suppression policies make it much harder for consumers, advocates, researchers, and policymakers to evaluate nursing home antipsychotic drugging practices,” said Richard Mollot, LTCCC’s Executive Director. “At a time when federal investigators continue to find that some nursing homes are masking their true antipsychotic drugging rates through inappropriate schizophrenia diagnoses, transparency is more important than ever.”

The release of these data coincides with a new letter which LTCCC and other advocates sent to CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz urging CMS to maintain and strengthen its antipsychotic quality measure rather than weaken or eliminate it. The letter notes that the measure remains an essential transparency and oversight tool in light of continuing concerns about widespread inappropriate drugging and data manipulation.

LTCCC’s Q4 2025 antipsychotic drugging data files and the letter to CMS are available at https://nursinghome411.org/data/ap-drugs/.