There is growing concern looming in the medical community: cases in which doctors prescribe adult psychiatric drugs to children aged two years old and below without proper evaluations are rapidly rising.

Such is the case of a young boy in California named Andrew Rios.

When Andrew was only five months old, he began to suffer from seizures. At 18 months old, an epilepsy medication prescribed to him only resulted to more violent behavior, and so he was recommended to take Risperdal (risperidone), a drug used in treating manic depression and schizophrenia.

However, Andrew's mother Genesis became more worried when the boy started to scream in his sleep and interact with objects and people that were not visible.

Genesis looked up Risperdal and found that the drug was not approved in children who were as young as Andrew.

"It was just 'Take this, no big deal,' like they were Tic Tacs. He was just a baby," said Genesis.

Rising Cases of Psychiatric Drug-Prescriptions

Data gathered by prescription company IMS Health revealed that cases similar to that of Andrew's are becoming prevalent.

About 20,000 prescriptions for quetiapine, risperidone and other psychiatric drugs were written in 2014 for children aged two and younger. A year before, the total prescriptions were only 13,000, making the increase in prescription rise up to 50 percent.

For the antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine), the prescriptions increased by 23 percent, in which it rose to 83,000, IMS Health said.

Doctors are alarmed with the fact that psychiatric drugs designed for adults are prescribed to children still in cribs even though there is no existing research proving their efficacy and their potential health risks to young children.

The IMS Health data did not reveal how many children received these prescriptions, but previous research showed that the number is at least 10,000. The data also did not reveal the conditions for which the prescriptions were written, but the rapid rise in the use of antidepressants and antipsychotics in younger children indeed suggests a trend, experts said.

'Seemingly Innocuous'

Tulane University School of Medicine Pediatrician Dr. Mary Margaret Gleason said the idea of psychiatric prescription for younger children does not seem harmful.

She said that since there are no current studies supporting the use of these psychiatric drugs in children, no further study is needed since the drugs have never been subjected to clinical trials in children.

"People are doing their very best with the tools available to them," said Gleason. "There's a sense of desperation with families of children who are suffering, and the tool that most providers have is the prescription pad."

Still, psychiatric experts have expressed concern over the matter. While parents are desperate and ready to alleviate alarming behavior that raises justifiable concerns, it is still not easy to just diagnose a child who is still in the early developmental stage, they said.

"I think you simply cannot make anything close to a diagnosis of these types of disorders in children of that age," said Dr. Ed Tronick of the University of Massachusetts Boston.

He said there is an extremely narrow range of what people think the prototype child for treatment should be and deviations from that prompt them to seek out unorthodox interventions.

Dr. Martin Drell said he is adamant about finding some rationale to justify the prescription of adult psychiatric drugs to younger children. He suggested that some of the cases need to be examined in order to find out if the drugs are indeed harmful or not.

"For the protection of kids, we should evaluate this. We should identify who these cases are. Maybe it's not 10,000, but I'll be unhappy if it's even in the hundreds," he added.

Photo : Bridget Colla | Flickr