The Vanishing Children

A gripping portrait of four children with mysterious cases of childhood psychosis, from NIH researcher and chief of research at the American Psychiatric Association Dr. Nitin Gogtay. At the turn of the twenty-first century, hundreds of families journeyed across the country to the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, desperate for answers about their children. These families had caught wind of a landmark new study, co-led by a recently graduated psychiatrist named Dr. Nitin Gogtay, who was looking to determine how schizophrenia and acute psychotic illnesses manifest in their youngest, purest form. Most children arrived at the study in a deep fog of hallucinations and voices. Some were taking up to forty to fifty pills a day. Others had histories of over twenty in-patient admissions. Nearly all of them were lacking proper care and treatment. Over the next twenty years, their families’ lives would be changed. In a deft blend of medical mystery and reportage, The Vanishing Children tells the riveting real stories of four children—Conner, Naomi, Sunny and Owen—who took part in one of the world’s first and only longitudinal studies of childhood mental illness. Their families journeyed down the rabbit hole of confounding symptoms, astounding rates of misdiagnoses and rushed, profit-driven treatment before they finally entered the study. There, over the next two decades, Dr. Gogtay and his team would introduce a groundbreaking “wraparound care” model, an approach few children with mental illness ever receive, which would change their lives forever. The result is more than just four unforgettable stories—it’s a road map for healing our fractured pediatric mental health care system.