Psych Drugs Drove Kid Crazy

The careless prescription of anti-psychotic drugs, often by psychiatrists who draw pay checks from the companies who make them, has drawn attention in the New York Times recently. Now Ann Bauer, writing in Salon, draws an intimate portrait of the effects of such carelessness on one autistic teenager, who turned from shy chess nerd to psychotic bruiser.

Bauer's son, depressed after the loss of a girlfriend, was prescribed atypical antipsychotics Abilify and Geodon after being misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. The result was a disaster, not  corrected until Bauer did her own research, and finally enlisted the help of the drug-company-insulated Mayo clinic, where her son's condition improved. (More medicine stories.)