How the problem started with Andrew

The seizure problem of Andrew Rio started when he was only 5 months old and it just gets worse through time. When he reached his 18th month of life, the epilepsy medicine made him violent. He was prescribed an antipsychotic Risperdal type of drug, which is usually used for the treatment of schizophrenia as well as bipolar disorder in adults. It is not typically used for kids younger than 5 years old.

When he screamed while sleeping, he also seems to deal with people and things that are not really visible around him, his scared mother made a research about the medicine, Rispedral and she was able to find out that the pill was not approved and had never been investigated in kids as young as his son. There is another case wherein the mother couldn’t resist and was not given a choice to refuse the pill during the clinical diagnosis of his son.

The cases similar to Andrew wherein kids ages 2 and below were given a psychiatric medicine to deal with the violent and withdrawal problems are continuously growing in numbers according to studies. A lot of doctors now worry so much that these pills made for adults and only carefully embraced for certain youngsters are still out in the market being prescribed to treat kids that are still under the nurturing of their moms even if there is no published research into the effectiveness and possible health problems for kids at a young age.

More about Resperdal

More than 20,000 Risperidone or Resperdal and other similar types of drugs were written in 2014 for kids ages 2 and below, there has been a 50% rise from the 13,000 just a year prior to the prescription according to the data given by the IMS Health. The prescriptions for the antidepressant fluoxetine or Prozac elevate from 24% in just 1 year for that certain age group to more than 83,000.

The information of the company doesn’t have an indication about the number of kids who got the medicines, however, in the past studies; there were suggestions that the number is around 10,000. The IMS Health researched data is upon the request of the New York Times. The data doesn’t have an indication about the condition for which the prescription drugs were made for.  The doctors are allowed to prescribe any type of medicine for any means that they see the drug fits in, so some of the medicines may be given an unproven manner, which are still the hot topics of most debates. However, the rate dramatically rises in the psychotropic like the antipsychotics as well as the antidepressants in kids ages 2 and below according to a trend.

In some of the interviews, lots of experts in child psychiatry as well as in child neurology said that they never had any encounter with kids getting such kind of medicine. They have assumed that the parents along with the doctors must be desperate enough in trying to control the temper and the tantrums of the kids, which is the kind of attitude that will be a possible problem of most day care centers.  However, Dr. Gleason once said that kids with ages measured in months still have brains with neurological inner workings that are still in the process of developing fast. It is still not known, however, if the use of certain kinds of medicine can help in influencing the growth of the brain. She also added that the medicines had never been subjected to any formal clinical trials in toddlers and in kids because of the risks involved.