In the year following the death of Rebecca Riley, Newsweek magazine, which had already published not one but two laudatory cover stories on Prozac as well as a puff piece on childhood depression, weighed in with yet another cover story, "Growing up bipolar: Max's world," which told the story of Max Blake, a boy who suffered from temper tantrums, attacking teachers and playmates without warning, biting and kicking and spitting at them. When Max reached the age of two, his parents took him to the Tufts-New England Medical Center, the same institution where Rebecca Riley was diagnosed and treated for bipolar disorder. Not surprisingly, Max also was diagnosed as bipolar by the doctors, who prescribed Depakote, and then Zyprexa, then another medication and then another. By the time Max was ten years old his doctors had prescribed a total of thirty-eight different psychotropic drugs. At the age of twenty-eight months he was kicked out of day care. Later he was kicked out of the special-needs classes at the local public school and sent to a special school for troubled children. He suffered rages, weight gain, and tics, blinking his eyes, clearing his throat and pulling at his clothes like he wanted to get out of his skin. He accused his mother of poisoning him; the article describes the boy's accusations as "delusional and paranoid."
"The bipolar brain is miswired," the article informs us, without adducing a shred of evidence for this assertion. The article goes on to admit there are no studies on the long-term effects of psychotropic medications on children, then tells us "Yet untreated bipolar disorder can be disastrous; 10 percent of sufferers go on to commit suicide," begging the question of how many of those 10% were "untreated" (i.e., undrugged). Any of them? Then we are told "Parents must choose between two wrenching options: treat their children and risk a bad outcome, or don't treat and risk a worse one." But since the author has already told us that there are no long-term studies on the effects of medication on these children, that second clause is a preposterous non-sequitur. We don't have any reason to believe that drugging these children decreases the likelihood of a bad outcome.
