The Unsung Psychiatric Impact of Strep Throat

Is your child mentally ill? Maybe not.

Overnight, a child transforms from happy-go-lucky to anxious, irritable, and obsessive. It seems to the family that the child must have been possessed in their sleep. This happened to my pre-adolescent daughter last winter. Even as a family physician also trained in Integrative Medicine, I did not know what had happened to my little girl.

An Abrupt Onset
While my family and I were spectators at a wrestling match, she began grunting, holding her ears, and banging her head with her hands. I thought she must have an acute illness or low blood sugar, but this was not the case. We tried to get her to eat something. We took her out of the gymnasium and she calmed down somewhat in the car, but that first tantrum-like episode was just the beginning of what would become a frequent recurrence over the next nine months.

Mad in America-2018