For almost two decades at the National Institute of Mental Health, I helped run the largest study of childhood-onset schizophrenia in the world. What we found still gives me pause even after more than twenty years. In almost thirty percent of the cases, doctors had made the wrong diagnosis.

The teenager everyone had run out of ideas for didn't need a hero. She needed the adults in her life to finally start talking to each other. 

In February 2025, the FDA removed the elaborate monitoring program that has governed one of psychiatry's most important drugs, clozapine. But the paperwork was never really the problem.