Sure the drugs gave her her sanity back...but now she's fat

The tack of this story is so wrongheaded it is kind of breathtaking. There's this drug that helped a girl get over her crippling schizophrenia, but it also made her gain weight as a side effect. The girl, quite understandably, is too thrilled with getting her life back to worry overmuch about her weight. Her doctors, on the other hand, are much more concerned.

Now, for the first time, Nia’s features were being corrupted. She started to take on the shape of many of the chronically mentally ill. Her jawline collapsed below puffed-out cheeks. Her stomach sagged above her jeans. Even the consultant found the contrast alarming. “Get a dietician to see her; tell the staff to watch what she eats; change her to Quetiapine.”

So they pulled her off the drug that worked, her psychosis returned, forcing them to switch back.

For a while the young psychiatrist worried about the consequences of the choices they had made in treating her. They had removed a stigma of the mind and replaced it with a stigma of the body. It struck him as strange that the patient had been the only one not to worry about a loss that the team around her found so tragic. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Perhaps, in fact, this was a merciful side-effect of medication, or even of the disorder itself; one that liberated Nia from the need to live up to the standards of an image-obsessed world.

So basically, the drugs gave her her sanity back...but now she's fat. What a dilemma. Wouldn't it be easier on everyone if she just found a convenient leafy pond to drown herself in instead?

Zuzu and Amanda has more.