Eliot Gelwan of Follow me Here is pretty politically oriented these days, but I’d still kind of like to hear what he’s got to say about this weekend’s Boston Globe article sensationalizing teen suicides that may or may not be related to their depression treatment.
My impression: Everyone should have monitored her more carefully. Her parents should have been told more about the side effects of the medication. The hospital should have notified her parents of suicidal ideation, or kept her in-house longer (my guess is her insurance was up so they declared her ready to leave). The Globe was irresponsible in its failure to point out the fact that it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between deaths caused by the disease and deaths caused by the treatment, and also in the way that it hyped up the Zoloft connection and just barely mentioned that she was also on antipsychotics and may have had auditory hallucinations, indicating that her illness was more severe than the run-of-the-mill teenager with depression.
The question: if you don’t medicate the kid, and she dies anyway, whose fault is it?
Secretly Ironic 