Free Republic

Christine Stanley will never forget the call. Two weeks after her daughter Emily started kindergarten, the teacher phoned in a panic. Emily would not color, sing or participate in any classroom activities; in fact, she would not say a word to anyone. It was not the first time Christine had received such a call. Emily had not talked at preschool, either. She did not make eye contact with store clerks or talk to nurses at the pediatrician's office. She ran off the playground if another child approached. Mrs. Stanley asked her sister, a special education teacher, what she thought. Mrs....

Looking back, Mark and Cheryl Miller would have done a lot of things differently with their 13-year-old son, Matt. They probably would never have left Lenexa, Kan. They would have sent him to a different school, and they certainly would have chosen a different therapist. But most of all, they wouldn't have given him Zoloft. ''It's not a pleasant thing living with the thought that you had a hand in your son's death,'' Mark Miller told me recently. ''Making him take those pills was done out of love for Matt, but it was still the wrong thing to do.'' We...

Meet Aberash Andreos. She's a 6-year-old girl from a remote village in southern Ethiopia. I met her at a Catholic-run clinic near the town of Awassa, where she was among the throngs of children awaiting lifesaving milk to rescue them from the famine that threatens millions of people in the Horn of Africa. Aberash is not one of the worst off. The really desperate children are inside the clinic, lying comatose on beds (two children to a bed) as nurses fight to keep them alive, or they are dying in their villages. The better-off children, like Aberash, can stand on...