Article: Psych Meds Drove My Son Crazy

This is an amazing story about a young man with Asperger's syndrome who developed "autistic catatonia" after being wrongly medicated. The crooked system of drug companies in bed with doctors is to blame.

Psych meds drove my son crazy
At 17, my son was a funny, odd autistic boy. But a misdiagnosis turned him into a violent, unpredictable man, and drove our family to the brink.
By Ann Bauer

This is a story with a hopeful ending. Lucky, even. But be forewarned, you have to get through a lot of hopeless, unlucky crap before you find it.

Here's how it all starts: My first-born son has autism.

Now that isn't hopeless or, in my opinion, unlucky. Autism isn't sick or crazy. It's rigid and routine, a little eccentric. Autism is multiplying columns of numbers easily while being unable to look anyone in the eyes; listening to only one band's music, and always in the same order, for a period of six weeks; refusing to eat anything orange. It's also being able to remember the exact date and time you ate a bison burger in Chamberlain, S.D., when you were 6. But there's a really charming side to all this, a wonderful tilted perspective on life that, if you're a parent of autism, you come quickly to enjoy.

I was a parent like this.

Until he was 17, my son was unique and funny and odd. He was difficult in some ways but incredibly easy in others. He washed the family's dishes precisely, went to bed at exactly the same time each night, and sorted our mail into careful piles. He did fairly well in school -- above average in math, a little below in social studies -- and spent his weekends playing tournament-level chess. He was a loner, but sweet and articulate and very close to his only brother.

Then junior year came. He met a girl, he went to a dance, he thought life was better. And for a night it was. Then the dance ended, the girl decided she was interested in someone else, and the boy became depressed.

(more at Salon.com...)