The number of people being diagnosed with mental illness is rising, and unfortunately there has been no sign that it will stop anytime soon. Although there are a lot of behavioral therapies to help treat the disorder, some health professionals think it is better to prescribe a drug than to utilize behavioral therapies to manage the illness.

In the United States, mental health care is mostly viewed as an opportunity to prescribe a certain antidepressant or antipsychotic drugs rather than to make use of cognitive behavioral therapy or other routes without using any medication. However, a new study found that this practice may be getting worse, especially among children under 2 years old.

The report revealed that the amount of babies who are prescribed psychotropic drugs doubled in one year; from 13,000 prescriptions in 2013 it became 20,000 in 2014, regardless of the fact that it lacks proof that the drug is effective and safe for young children. The idea of a one year old child needing antidepressant or antipsychotic drugs is just hard to imagine, impossible even. However, psychiatrists usually recommend these drugs to young children, even infants, for behavioral issues like usual aggression, temper tantrums, and lethargy.

According to IMS Health, a prescription company that conducted the research, Risperdal is one of the most commonly prescribed medications to infants and toddlers. It is an antipsychotic drug that is used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and changes the chemical effects in the brain. Drugs.com urged readers to "never give Risperdal to a child without a doctor's advice."

New York Times reported that IMS Health discovered that prescriptions for another drug called Prozac which is an antidepressant increased by 23% in a year. There were about 83,000 prescriptions for Prozac that were given to children below 2 years old in 2014. There is not a lot of research on the effectiveness of these drugs to help treat behavioral problems with very young children. However, mental health experts think that the trend is a just a continuation of a much larger issue- that it's much quicker and more financially desirable for the health provider to prescribe pills for mental health problems.