Daniel's mother is Sara Fritz. Daniel's father is Joe Kidney.

Was Daniel having trouble reconciling something?

So, they got him help, but did they talk to him??

I would have been on him constantly.

While the Fritz-Kidney's grief is enormous and while my sympathy is with them, I can't help but think that Daniel was a victim of autoerotic asphyxiation. If you think that's far-fetched, we'll remind you that even OPRAH has done segments on the wonders of the method. How far we've come: from obscure references in a William Burroughs piece to being pumped into our living rooms at 4:40 PM on a weekday! Progress!

I think this story might point to something beyond drugs. It raises the dangers of introducing children into the therapeutic culture at a young age.

Many modern folk who think exorcism was the epitome of ignorance and barbarity don't hesitate to refer their troubled children to counselling of one type or another. They seem generally to believe (or hope) there are negative feelings inside (The secular devil?) that will somehow be expelled in a gush if the child confronts and talks them out with a professional stranger. In my experience as a lawyer and husband of a teacher, child therapists rarely do much, as the kids don't cooperate--they are insulted, resistant and embarassed. But the parents push on, convinced by Ann Landers that they are behaving as reponsibly as when they take a fevered child to a pediatrician.

Therapy may do some good for some adults, but it is tough and requires a lot of pained strength. The whole point is to force the patient to see how others see him/her and confront this often unpleasant fact. That is simply too much hard reality for most children and strikes me as akin to telling a child, in the name of truth, that his parent doesn't love him as unconditionally as he always thought. Innocence is shattered and the child is forced to see the bleak and dangerous side of life when he is not emotionally equipped to do so. Thus again are we paying for innocence lost far too early at our urgings.

Just a thought and I don't know where it leads, except to caution and encouraging parents to see they should deal with this problem, not farm it out. Sandy is right.

On the other hand, one should be wary of drawing general conclusions from isolated tragedies like this. Let's leave that seedy job to Michael Moore. Peace to the parents.

There but for the Grace of God ....

Perhaps some good can come of it, by telling their story, especially the advice to have a healthy distrust of doctors and their diangoses, and use your own best judgment. Treat the doctors as consultants, but you are ultimately the boss. It is your kid, not theirs. The doctor can walk away and not be destroyed by a child suicide; a parent will never really get over it. This is the view I take when confronting fringe characters in my oldest son's life - teachers, doctors, etc. "Thanks for your input, but please understand that you are just a stopping point along his life, while I am in it for the long haul. I'll decide what is best for him, thanks". I don't of course say this explicitly, but it's how I think.

I have a friend who has a son aged 10 who sounds an awful lot like this boy, and has been on Adderall too I believe. He is getting re-evaluated for the ADHD diagnosis, just yesterday in fact. I'll make sure to send this article to her, even though it is very hard to read, with the tears falling down and all.

Sad story, but not that complicated. ADD and ADHD are overdiagnosed, but even accounting but improper diagnoses hyperactivity is still way more common among pre-teens than bipolar disorder, which is probably what the kid actually had. The two diseases have some common symptoms, so it's easy to see how the doctors botched the diagnosis.

OJ's misguided commentary tries to shoehorn a Lesson Concerning the Politicization of Medicine into a story where the lesson doesn't really apply. The therapist who told the parents that Daniel needed "a kick in the pants" and recommended military school doesn't sound very politically correct to me. If Daniel only had symptoms of depression instead of bipolar disorder, I can imagine the therapist saying Daniel just had normal adolescent moodiniess and just needed some cheering up.

Peter:

Granted bipolar is a real disease that needs treatment by a professional, but how does one tell the difference between depression in a child and "normal adolescent moodiness"? What is the difference between hyperactivity and rambunctiousness? I confess to being very wary of "diagnoses" and professional treatments of these conditions, with or without drugs.

Peter:

He was prescribed drugs, not just a kick in the pants. All too often, kids are given drugs to shut their parents up, not to treat the kids.

Your starting premise is that doctors often assume a kid has a disorder like ADHD instead of recognizing that the kid is just rambunctious. Certainly true, since everyone seems to agree that ADD and ADHD are overdiagnosed. But here the therapist erred in the opposite direction: he mistook a serious disorder for a milder disease and prescribed the wrong drug. This is not a case of parents pressuring a doctor into an ADHD misdiagnosis, for the therapist resisted the parents' suggestion that the kid had something more serious than ADHD.

You say that the trend of misdiagnosing healthy kids as having ADHD leads to children with other disorders being misdiagnosed as ADHD. But that's a big leap in logic, both in the general and specific cases. In the specific, we have no idea if Daniel's therapist misdiagnoses healthy kids. Given the therapist's comments about military school, I suspect not. In the general case, even if doctors never misdiagnosed healthy kids, how would that make them less likely to mistake bipolar disorder or depression for ADHD? Even accounting for the misdiagnoses, hyperactivity is a far more common disease among pre-teens.

The politicization of medicine leads to lots of rotten medical decisions, but that didn't happen here. All that happened is that a doctor mistook a rarer disease for a more common disease.

When I was at the Pentagon, one of the guys I worked with came home and found his 16-yr old daughter had shot herself.

They were a very religious family. The girl wasn't taking any mood-altering drugs.

What conclusion can one draw from this, except that it was a horrible tragedy?

None. The plural of anecdote is not data.

Peter:

We want medicine to always have something ready to give us to make us better--it's easier for doctors and others to just give us the pills than argue with us. This habit reaches the point where even real illnesses may be ignored. ADHD has become such a ubiquitous dioagnosis that it seems not unlikely that both are happening.

It is also interesting that ADHD and hyperactivity is diagnosed in boys so frequently in an era where we shy away from the discipline and harsh punishment boys were always assumed to need and benefit from.

Jeff, I agree with you completely to the extent anyone is trying to pin blame or suggest the specific death was foreseeable or preventable. That is outrageous and unspeakable cruel. But it is fair ball to use these incidents to start some deep thinking about how we view and treat children's enotional problems and to question mainstream thinking.

"We want medicine to always have something ready to give us to make us better--it's easier for doctors and others to just give us the pills than argue with us." No argument there, that's a serious problem in medicine.

"This habit reaches the point where even real illnesses may be ignored." Superficially plausible, but wrong. If a doctor sees four hypochondriacs in a row, maybe he's tempted to assume his fifth patient is also a hypochondriac. But would he really send the fifth patient out the door without performing a proper examination? If the doctor botches the fifth paient's diagnosis, it's not because he saw too many hypochondriacs that day but because he couldn't tell the difference between a crank and someone truly ill.

So too with ADHD. Maybe Daniel's therapist often deals with pushy parents who insist that healthy kids get meds, but he botched the diagnosis because he was lazy or incompetent, not because he dealt with too many pushy parents.

You miss my point--the hypochondriacs all got the pills too.

A doctor may have a lot of patients with headaches. Some are hypochondriacs, some have migraine, some have brain tumors. If the doctor prescribes migraine drugs to the hypochondriacs to kick them out of his office, it doesn't make him more likely to misdiagnose brain tumors as migraine. If he misses brain tumors a lot it's because he's incompetent.

There's no insidious flip-side to misdiagnosing healthy kids as having ADD/ADHD. Mistaking bipolar disorder and depression for ADD/ADHD is an unrelated problem that shares the common symptom of bogus diagnoses.

Peter:

Postmodernism has largely triumphed over medicine--illnesses are mere social constructs. Kids, for example, are diagnosed with ADHD to absolve parents and teachers of responsibility for their behavior. Then drugs are prescribed in order to make the unruly more docile. It's almost always boys, who are under attack in the culture anyway, so no one much minds. The truly ill are just caught in the crossfire.

This brings to mind Paul Johnson's quip that modern therapy is intended more to coddle the unhappy than cure the sick.

Postmodernism has had an unfortunate effect on the way mental health care is practiced, though it hasn't "triumphed" by any stretch of the imagination. (Even with ADD, it's not all that hard to diagnose the disease properly.)

Maybe I understand your point (correct me if I'm wrong): a doctor who thinks that almost all mental illnesses are social constructs, and who sees no difference between unruly behavior and genuine ADHD, will be more likely to miss diseases that don't fit into that pattern, such as bipolar disorder.

In this specific case, though, Daniel's doctor seems refreshingly free of touchy-feely postmodernist psychology. A psychologist who actually tells parents to send their kid to military school hardly denies the importance of personal responsibility and self-discipline. Clearly, he thought Daniel simply had ADHD and missed all indications of a more serious disease.

Or it could be far simpler.

The rate of suicides among kids presenting with complex symptoms is very small. In a haystack, one won't necessarily find the needle everytime.

No system is failure proof.

Man, I wouldn't attempt to diagnose the suicide of anybody on the basis of that small nugget of information.

The second most popular preacher in my county and his wife committed suicide day before yesterday. Don't know why.

I do know we're better off without him. When the American Airlines plane crashed off Long Island, he preached a sermon that all the people aboard deserved what they got because of their sins (presumably including the six or so babes in arms).

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of man?

Like Brian, the possibility of autoerotic asphyxiation crossed my mind. There would usually be some additional evidence of that, but discoverers often clean it up before calling the cops or the EMTs or whoever they call.

Here's a novel idea--read the story not just the excerpt. He was pissed because he hadn't gotten to go to a party.

Then maybe it wasn't suicide, but instead a passive-aggressive attack on his parent/s.

Here is a novel idea. Maybe there is more to the story than not getting to go to a party.

Jeff:

Did you read the story and./or listen to the interview?

OJ:

No, can't say I'm guilty of that. Rather, I'll bet there just had to be more to the entire story than missing a party.

But I can't be certain, hence the non-rhetorical "maybe."

Her story is deeply moving and a caution to us all--it should be heard and spread.

Orrin:

If Jeff can't see a 50% divorce rate as having any bearing on how we should view marriage, why would you hope he would see this story as anything other than an isolated anecdote?

Peter B:

A 50% divorce rate means that fewer people should marry, not fewer should divorce.

So, when the divorce rate was,say 12%, people were more qualified? What does that tell you about our longer term prospects if such an effect/trend continues?

Tom:

I suspect Michael is setting us up for a polygamy plug here. I'm not sure he is counting those defective women who would find bliss as second or third wives.

We had a 16 year old boy in our neighborhood commit suicide this year. As far as we can tell, he was depressed about his parent's divorce. I agree with Peter, we cannot underestimate the impact of divorce on children.

Last week Dennis Prager was interviewing an author/psychologist on marriage and divorce. He said that the impact of divorce on children varies depending on the reason for the divorce. If a marriage is terrible, and there is constant fighting and/or abuse going on, then children tend to do better after divorce. However, if the marriage was basically friendly and civil, and the parents divorce mainly because they are bored with the marriage or not in love anymore, this has a very negative effect on children.

Once children enter into a family, parents have to put the children's welfare above their own desires. Staying in a dull, but civil marriage should be a sacrifice that every parent should be willing to make for their children.

Robert:

Studies have shown that even in those terrible marriages kids do better if the parents stay together--physical violence seems to be about the only good reason to part as regards the kids.

Rober/Orrin

Forgive me for playing devil's advocate, but lots of kids appear to do fine in the divorce culture too, if you are talking about things like marks, mental health, etc. If there is money and contact with both parents, the stats are ambiguous. But, according to Judith Wallerstein, there are real problems later when they try to build their own relationships---they simply can't trust their partner unconditionally or get rid of the notion than every incidence of friction calls the health of the marriage into account. So divorce breeds divorce, which is no way to build a prosperous society and prevents one from being truly happily married.

Robert is right. Every new parent should have a sign posted on their door to greet them when they return from the hospital: "You don't come first any more!"

Peter:

Your last comment is spot on.

I do think most kids are more resilient than some think. And, since many kids vow, when they grow up, to not do things the way their parents did, their attitude towards divorce might very well become reactionary.

Wherever did that 50% slam come from?

The most effective anecdotes are just what this one is: compelling stories, typcially conveying a cautionary message. Was I wrong in suggesting that anecdotes aren't the best possible basis for diagnosing societal trends?

Robert D.'s remark called to mind a family we know.

The father is, to put it mildly, insane. The mother is submissive to an unbelievable degree. The kids were high achievers in school (home schooled) and completely unprepared to live in a real world.

The oldest girl left home at 18 and within a few months ended up getting raped and murdered and thrown into the Charles River by her new "friends."

I always thought the children should have been taken away from the parents, but never could figure out how to arrange it. Now I'm sure I was right.

I take marriages on a case-by-case basis but agree parents need to sacrifice for their kids, not sacrifice them.