Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker Read Free Book Online Page B

York for a psychiatric evaluation. There they saw a nurse practitioner, who immediately concluded that Jessica was “bipolar.” The practitioner explained that Jessica had a chemical imbalance and recommended that Jessica be put on a cocktail of three drugs: Depakote, Risperdal, and lithium.
    “It blew my mind, especially the thought of putting her on antipsychotics,” Jason says. “She was
four
years old.”
    He and his wife left that consultation not knowing what to do. Kelley works for Oswego County’s family service agency, and she knew of many troubled children who had been put on psychiatric medications. In that setting, the county expected parents to comply with medical advice. “There was part of me that thought maybe Jessica is bipolar, that’s what it is,” Kelley says. Moreover, SUNY Health Sciences told the Smiths that the center wouldn’t see Jessica again if she weren’t medicated. All of this pointed to following the center’s advice—the “experts are telling you that you need to do this, and that it is biological,” Jason says—but he had previously worked as a pharmacy technician and knew that drugs could have powerful side effects. “I was scared out of my mind.”
    Kelley used the Internet to research the drugs that had been recommended. However, she couldn’t find any study that told of goodlong-term outcomes for children placed on such drug cocktails, and even the short-term side effects, she remembers, “were scary.” Meanwhile, Jessica’s pediatrician told them she thought it would be “absurd” to put Jessica on psychiatric drugs; Jason and Kelley’s families also thought it would be a mistake. Jason remembered how a few years earlier talk therapy had helped him address his own “anger management” issues, and if he had been able to change with out the use of medications, couldn’t Jessica change her behavior too?
    “We just didn’t want to accept [the bipolar diagnosis]. Jessica is such an outgoing child, and we like to think she is gifted,” Kelley says. “And she had made so much progress from the time she was two years old. We just couldn’t see giving her the medications.”
    They made that decision in 2005, and three years later, they say, Jessica is doing well. She gets mostly A’s in school; her teachers now think that her earlier bipolar diagnosis was “crazy.” While she does sometimes quarrel with other kids and will lash back verbally if another child teases her, she knows that she can’t hit anyone. At home, she still has the occasional meltdown, but her emotional outbursts are not so extreme as before. Jessica even has her own advice on how all parents should handle such tirades: “They should say [to their child] ‘come here,’ and then they should rub them on the back so they feel better and so they can’t have a meltdown, and so when they stop having a meltdown, that’s what they will remember.”
    Before I leave, Jessica reads to me the book
The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything
, and more than once she jumps to the floor to act out a scene. “Even with her behavioral issues, everybody loves her,” her father says. “And that’s what we were afraid of, with the medication, was that it would totally change her, and her personality. We didn’t want to impair her faculties. We just want her to grow up to be healthy and to succeed in life.”
    Two different families, two different decisions. Both families now saw their decision as the right one, and both believed that their child was on a better path than he or she otherwise would have been. That was heartening, and I promised to check in with both familieslater, toward the end of my reporting for this book. Still, Nathan and Jessica were clearly on different paths, and as I drove back to Boston, all I could think about was how both sets of parents had needed to make their decision, on whether to medicate their child, in a
scientific vacuum
. Did their child really suffer from a