Rebecca Riley is dead, at 4 years of age a victim of a quack doctor operating on a quack theory who saw a child act out and slapped a label on her rather than try to understand her, a doctor who found it easier to take the word of parents than to probe and think. She's a victim of lazy, ignorant parents, perhaps too trusting of professionals, perhaps too trusting of pills in general given their own mental health experiences, almost certainly too focused on having a trouble-free day than on actually raising their children or seeing what was plainly before their eyes.

I don't know where to begin with this. I don't know if there's even anything that needs to be said. It seems so obvious. And yet, clearly it was not obvious to these parents, who couldn't look past their expectation of a nice quiet doll-child to see what was there for everyone else to see. It wasn't clear to an M.D. professional who by all that's holy should have known better. But, there's a rule in tragedies like this - a mistake chain. One failure does not make a tragedy. Two do not. It takes a chain of failures, one after the other after the other, any one of which would have averted catastrophe, all summing together to make it inevitable: parents, doctor, pharmacist, onlookers, Social Services.