12/19/2025
Four hospitalizations. Every psychiatric medication failed.
This 14-year-old boy was disappearing into psychosis right before his parents' eyes. The diagnosis seemed obvious—severe mental illness requiring long-term psychiatric care.
Except it wasn't mental illness at all.
It was a bacterial infection causing autoimmune encephalitis. His brain was inflamed from an infection, not a psychiatric disorder. And once they figured this out? Antibiotics cured what antipsychotics never could.
He came off all psychiatric medications. The psychosis resolved completely. He got his life back.
This isn't rare. It's just rarely diagnosed.
How many kids are being treated for mental illness when they actually have an infection? How many families are watching their children suffer on medications that will never work because we're treating the wrong problem?
Before adding another psychiatric medication, we owe it to our patients to ask: Is this really mental illness, or is something else going on?
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