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Who Killed Rebecca Riley?
March 25, 2007
Sometimes you read something so horrible you want to find someone to shake until they give you some answers. But this story may not have any answers.
Pictured at right is Rebecca Riley, aged 4, who died Dec. 13, 2006 from an overdose of prescribed drugs. (Photo ©AP) This article from the AP via MSNBC says that Rebecca was diagnosed as having attention deficit hyperactivity and bipolar disorder when she was just two-and-a-half. Prosecutors are alleging that Rebecca's parents, Michael and Carolyn Riley, were trying to "keep their daughter quiet" with her medication; they've been charged with murder.
The Rileys, through their attorneys, are accusing Rebecca's psychiatrist of over-prescribing medication.
The psychiatrist involved is Dr. Kayoko Kifuji of the Tufts-New England Medical Center. You can find her page here, which lists her specialties as "child psychiatry, mood disorders, anxiety disorder, child and adolescent eating disorders" among others. Dr. Kifuji is currently on paid leave. She has denied any involvement in the death and has agreed to a suspension of her license while the state medical board investigates.
The medical examiner said that Rebecca died from a combination of Clonidine, Depakote, cough suppressant and an antihistamine. Clonidine and Depakote are FDA-approved for adults only, although it's legal to prescribe them to children (as is done fairly often.)
The death of Rebecca raises a lot of unsettling and difficult questions: how early can a diagnosis of mental illness be made? Are some parents medicating their children because it's more convenient - and easier - than parenting? Why did the "system" - including teachers, school nurses, neighbors, relatives, pharmacists and medical professionals - fail Rebecca so thoroughly? And who is responsible for little Rebecca's death: her parents, who may have given her more medication than was prescribed, or the psychiatrist, who may have prescribed too much? Or was it simply an accident?
Finally, two sobering statistics from the article linked to above:
"A study of mentally ill children discharged from community hospitals, published in January in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found the proportion of children diagnosed with bipolar disorders jumped from 2.9 percent in 1990 to 15.1 percent in 2000."
The annual number of U.S. children prescribed anti-psychotic drugs jumped fivefold between 1995 and 2002, to an estimated 2.5 million, according to a study published last year by researchers at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital in Nashville, Tenn.
Feel free to vent/sympathize/empathize in the comments section.