Ten and a half months later, on Jan. 10, 2004, her mother, Mathy Milling Downing, found Candace hanging from the valance over her bed in their Laytonsville, Md., home. "There was never a note," Downing says, her words choked by tears. "An hour before, she was on her father's lap watching Animal Planet. This is what these drugs do to children."
Contrast the Downings' tragic story with that of Sherri Walton. Each of her three daughters has obsessivecompulsive disorder, and her oldest girl, Jordan, also struggles with depression. When she was 13, she sobbed to her mother, "I am a horrible person. I just want to kill myself." Walton realized that Jordan was not simply experiencing the puberty blues but was in the midst of a serious depression. A psychiatrist prescribed antidepressants, and after a month Jordan began to feel better.
During the past year, parents have been engulfed in information about the effectiveness and safety of using antidepressant drugs with children. Some reports say the drugscalled selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI sare the best medicine for debilitating melancholy, while others say the drugs paradoxically increase the risk of suicide in young people. This scientific debate is what brought both Walton and Downing to hearings at the Food and Drug Administration. While Downing sat crying in the audience three weeks following Candace's death, Walton came to tell a positive story. She explained how this "beautiful 14yearold was functioning and happy with life because of these meds." For Walton's family and others, the same drugs that others decry have created a normal life.