Big Pharma and Halloween Our team recently received beautiful fall pictures of Carly as a child to share on our Facebook pages. The Halloween pictures show her over the years, in her Harry Potter cape…always Harry Potter. Smiling proudly after nights of trick or treating. Carly with her mom. Her mom dressed as a pirate, Carly, of course, as a Hogwarts student.
One picture, in particular, stopped me: Carly, maybe around 10 years old, staring intently at a pumpkin while her Papaw explained how to carve it.
These pictures hit me differently. Maybe it is the time that has passed. Maybe it is how much I have come to love Carly and her family as my own. Seeing her in rooms at her grandparents’ house, rooms that I now know personally, a place that has become like home to me, made it all feel even more personal.
And then I felt anger. Anger at Big Pharma. Anger at the professionals who prescribed Carly black box SSRI medications, she never should have been given. Anger that those same professionals, whom Carly and her mom trusted, still get to dress their kids for Halloween, carve pumpkins, and decorate their homes for fall. They collect their paychecks and move on with their lives, unaffected by the consequences of prescribing the wrong medications.
Meanwhile, Carly sits in an actual prison. Her family, in their own kind of prison. Their prisoners of their despair, exhaustion, and fear, as they struggle to save her from a legal system that, just like the medical system, failed her too.
Carly, now 16, has not been outside prison walls since March 19, 2024, the day of the tragedy. Within moments, Ashley’s life was gone, and Carly’s was lost because professionals did not take the time to listen. Instead, they tossed a cocktail of medications at her. The one that sent her over the edge? Maybe it was Lexapro, a black box warning SSRI that no child should be prescribed. I wonder if their own children were suffering like Carly if they would prescribe the same to their own children.
One of her therapists even testified at her trial that the day she found out what happened was “the worst day of her life.” Really? She went home, and her life continued. Carly’s did not.
Now a child who suffered from mental illness is in a prison that does not provide adequate or scheduled medications. A prison that does not follow its own rules, where her daily schedule changes without warning. How does a child in that environment heal, cope, or begin to be rehabilitated? How does a child with mental health cope without a structured routine that could help her feel safe? No one seems to care.
I am conservative, believe in conservative values and I believe prisons are necessary for adults who break laws. But I will admit this: before Carly, I never thought twice about what incarcerated juveniles endured.
Then Carly came into my life.
I learned how many children with mental health struggles are thrown behind bars. How many “Carlys” have been cast aside and forgotten? Carly has an amazing support system that refuses to give up on her, but how many other kids are left with no one? How many, if given the chance at real rehabilitation, could walk out healthy and ready to contribute to society?
Carly is insanely intelligent. She wanted to go to MIT. At 13, she scored a 30 on the ACT, just five points shy of Harvard. That is how smart she is. A test that 17- and 18-year-old juniors and seniors in high school take…..Carly was 13! What will society miss out on with her behind bars instead of being properly medicated and treated? Imagine where she, and kids like her, could be five or ten years from now. Sadly, most people only see “kids who commit crimes.” End of story.
Right now, Carly sits in prison, watching the seasons and holidays pass by. Another Halloween she will not spend like a typical teenager, running through the night with friends, laughing and free.
And I cannot help but feel angry. Angry that so many doctors, whose children will enjoy the season, don’t know how their parents’ choices have sentenced kids like Carly to be thrown away and forgotten.
