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An editorial in the May 2003 Psychiatric Services discusses whether patients are being harmed by medication errors. The authors point out that recent reports by the Institute of Medicine suggest that errors in inpatient settings are associated with thousands of deaths and that they cost many millions of dollars annually. "Of the slightly more than one million hospitalizations in the United States in 1998, 25.8 percent were psychiatric admissions. Therefore, the number of psychiatric inpatients at risk of unintended harm and suboptimal care is substantial."
Very few reports have been published on error rates or adverse events in psychiatry and there are virtually no published articles on any serious methodology that approaches a review of the subject. A MEDLINE search using medication errors or adverse drug events as keywords yielded only 44 articles.
Without more research, the risk of unintended harm from medication errors in psychiatry will remain unknown. The authors conclude that "all psychiatrists who treat hospitalized patients should learn about current issues and terminology in the area of medication errors and understand the strengths and limitations of their hospital's error detection approach." They suggest that hospitals implement safety reviews as a usual part of their processes to prevent such errors.
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In a related article in this same issue, a study compared the effectiveness of using a review team and the usual self-reporting method in detecting different types of medication errors in a state psychiatric hospital. A review team looked retrospectively at 31 charts and detected a total of 2,194 medication errors, whereas a total of nine errors were self-reported for the same patient group. Administration errors accounted for more than half of the total (66 percent), followed by transcription errors (23 percent), prescription errors (11 percent), and dispensing errors (less than 1 percent). Nineteen percent of errors were rated as having a low risk of harm, 23 percent as having a moderate risk, and 58 percent as having a high risk.
You can draw your own conclusions.
10:21:28 PM 
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