Yes, You Can Catch Insanity

[whitecoast]

Yes, You Can Catch Insanity

A controversial disease revives the debate about the immune system and mental illness.

nautil.us

One day in March 2010, Isak McCune started clearing his throat with a forceful, violent sound. The New Hampshire toddler was 3, with a Beatles mop of blonde hair and a cuddly, loving personality. His parents had no idea where the guttural tic came from. They figured it was springtime allergies.
Soon after, Isak began to scream as if in pain and grunt at his parents and peers. When he wasn’t throwing hours-long tantrums, he stared vacantly into space. By the time he was 5, he was plagued by insistent, terrifying thoughts of death. “He would smash his head into windows and glass whenever the word ‘dead’ came into his head. He was trying to drown out the thoughts,” says his mother, Robin McCune, a baker in Goffstown, a small town outside Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city.

Isak’s parents took him to pediatricians, therapy appointments, and psychiatrists. He was diagnosed with a host of disorders: sensory processing disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). At 5, he spent a year on Prozac, “and seemed to get worse on it,” says Robin McCune.

The McCunes tried to make peace with the idea that their son might never come back. In kindergarten, he grunted and screamed, frightening his teachers and classmates. “He started hearing voices, thought he saw things, he couldn’t go to the bathroom alone,” Robin McCune says. “His fear was immense and paralyzing.”

Other kids afflicted with PANDAS hear voices or experience “Alice in Wonderland” syndrome, wildly distorted perceptions.

As his behaviors worsened, both parents prepared themselves for the possibility that he’d have to be home-schooled or even institutionalized. Searching for some explanation, they came across a controversial diagnosis called pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococci, or PANDAS. First proposed in 1998, PANDAS linked the sudden onset of psychiatric symptoms like Isak’s to strep infections.
They didn’t give it much thought. Periodic strep tests on Isak had always come back negative. And his symptoms seemed too dramatic to be the result of a simple, common childhood infection.

But as Isak’s illness dragged into its fourth year, they reconsidered the possibility. The year before the epic meltdowns began, his older brother had four strep infections; perhaps it was more than coincidence. In September 2013, three and a half years after his first tics appeared, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist in Boston put Isak on azithromycin, a common antibiotic used to treat food poisoning, severe ear infections, and particularly persistent cases of strep throat.

The results were dramatic. Isak’s crippling fear vanished within days. Then he stopped grunting. Less than a week after starting his son on the antibiotic, Adam McCune saw Isak smile for the first time in nearly four years. After a few weeks, the tantrums that had held the family hostage for years faded away.

Today, Adam McCune, a writer, likens the experience to welcoming his son back from captivity. “It’s like he was a POW for four years, and returned out of the blue one day,” he says. “To have my son back within a week was incredible.”

 

[Voyageur]

That is a super great story and outcome for a very young sick boy, Isak. At first (before PANDAS) it kind of looked like mercury or possibly an aluminum neurological reaction. As for Strep, and I might be wrong here, some tests are speed tests and not as accurate, or so I've been told (yet they would do two tests normally - one takes longer), which might be the reason for his negatives when tested.

Regardless, this is one to remember and thanks for posting it!

 

[Laura]

How many other cases of mental illness are due to infectious agents or drug/food reactions?

Mainstream medicine needs to get cracking on trying to be healers with accurate diagnostics, instead of killers with "one size fits all" Big Pharma drug-du-jour prescriptions.

 

[SMM]

Mainstream medicine needs to get cracking on trying to be healers with accurate diagnostics, instead of killers with "one size fits all" Big Pharma drug-du-jour prescriptions.

There's a KevinMD article that was published a few days ago, "Our Healers Need Healing", that summed it up aptly especially at the end:

But we also recognize that healers need healing too. And that the body of medicine, as a whole, also needs to wake up.

There are lot of misdiagnosis that happening for many reasons, such as time constraints, and sometimes because of ideologies and medical paradigms.

Isak's parents did well to stay the course in finding a solution. Thanks for sharing.

 

[3DStudent]

Makes me wonder. I had a lot of strep throat and ear infections as a kid. The only long term antibiotic protocol I've done was for Lyme and/or co-infections a few years back.

 

[Chu]

Makes me wonder. I had a lot of strep throat and ear infections as a kid. The only long term antibiotic protocol I've done was for Lyme and/or co-infections a few years back.

How about having it tested? Then you'll know for sure.