TheygoMew wrote:
He wasn't violent before. Something changed. Was he put on medications that made him aggressive?
In the earlier story (the one at the link "a series of medications") she says he was at some point misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and was given with drugs for that (neuroleptics). And then, later, another doctor said that that was a misdiagnosis and diagnosed him with "autistic catatonia," which seemed to be correct, since stopping the neuroleptics and starting treatment for catatonia improved things dramatically. I guess that wasn't the end of the story, though.
Oh, and the point being that neuroleptics are known to make "autistic catatonia" worse. Also, if you have it, the odds of having a toxic reaction increase ("neuroleptic malignant syndrome"). I don't know if violence is known to associated with it, though.
Quote:
I was up all night, for many nights in a row, with nothing better to do than search online.
The first thing I found was a list of “infrequent” side effects of the very first drug, the antidepressant he’d been given nearly two years before. Among these: auditory hallucinations, narcolepsy and obesity.
The second was an obscure article about a boy who sounded exactly like my son: a high-functioning young man with Asperger’s syndrome who’d suddenly become nonfunctional at the age of 17 and was diagnosed with something called autistic catatonia.
It was 3 a.m. and I was on the couch under a blanket with my dying laptop, alone in the silence of a sleeping house. That’s when I Googled “autistic catatonia” and hit the mother lode. There were dozens of stories, coming from countries all over the world, and each one described in wretched detail the previous year of my son’s life: the slowing, the disintegration, the delusions and insomnia and explosive anger.
In addition, they all warned — each and every journal article, white paper and scientific treatise — that the one thing practitioners should never do is prescribe antipsychotic medications, such as Abilify and Geodon, because they will make the symptoms of autistic catatonia much worse. And it might cause permanent damage.
The third thing I found was a Web site that described neuroleptic malignant syndrome, a slow poisoning by prescription that lasts (and this is the part that caught my attention) even after the drug is stopped.
Finally, believe it or not, we’ve reached the hopeful, lucky part. Only I didn’t know that yet.
I was crazed. Throughout the early morning hours, I e-mailed people. The retired doctor from Stony Brook, N.Y., who had authored original work on autistic catatonia; a therapist from the Netherlands who claimed to have a new method for treating it; researchers at our local university. Then I went to bed and slept fitfully for exactly one hour and 40 minutes.
When I awoke, at 7:30, my e-mail box was full. The most helpful response came from the gentleman once of Stony Brook, now professor emeritus of both psychiatry and neurology, a genuine mensch, living on Long Island with his wife. “Dear Mrs. Bauer,” he’d written at 6:48 a.m., “I know of no one in Minneapolis who understands the connection between autism and catatonia. But the clinicians at Mayo are very knowledgeable. Would you like me to make a referral?” Other messages simply advised me to seek medical attention for my son immediately, to flush the medications from his system. “It sounds as if your son is, indeed, suffering from autistic catatonia,” one doctor wrote. “But I believe most of the symptoms you describe are related to the inappropriate use of neuroleptics.”
I don't know why the mother/author leaves this part out of the newer article. ??
20 Dec 2011, 4:45 pm
