A ten-year retrospective study of the consultations of 50 families with a city general practice was used to test the hypothesis that mothers who receive an excess of psychotropic drugs have children who receive an excess of antibiotics for episodes of acute respiratory illness. The children of the 10 mothers classed as high psychotropic users were seen twice as often with acute respiratory illness and received twice as many antibiotics as the children of the mothers who had received no psychotropic medication. The association between high psychotropic and high antibiotic use was not linked in time, and indeed the time of highest antibiotic use coincided with the time when the mother received fewest psychotropic prescriptions. It is suggested that at many of these consultations the mother rather than the child should have been treated as the patient.