HJBR May/Jun 2019

Healthcare Journal of BATON ROUGE I  MAY / JUN 2019 25 that I didn’t estimate that this would have such serious consequences, quite frankly.” “Someone Who Could Fix Him” Mani Pavuluri, a child psychiatrist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, acknowl- edged mistakes in prescribing lithium to children, but said that she treated each child enrolled in her study “like an angel.”Raised in India, Pavuluri graduated from medical school in New Zealand and began her train- ing there, she wrote in a 2016 book profiling prominent women in academic psychiatry. She started in obstetrics and gynecology, but didn’t like it. When supervisors sug- gested she try psychiatry, she discovered she was fascinated by the “intimacy”of try- ing to solve people’s problems. Pavuluri decided tomove to the U.S. after reading about researchers in child psychia- try here and ultimately joined the psychiatry department at the University of Illinois Col- lege of Medicine in 2000. She founded the Pediatric Mood Disorders Program, which became a nationally renowned clinic spe- cializing in diagnosing and treating children and teenagers with bipolar disorder and other mood-related mental illnesses. As her career got underway, her motto was “dream it and do it,” she wrote in the book. She did both. Within five years of arriving at UIC, she had tenure. She set her sights on combin- ing psychiatry and neuroscience to under- stand how the brain functions in children withmood disorders, including bipolar dis- order. She won national awards, was named a distinguished fellow at theAmericanAcad- emy of Child andAdolescent Psychiatry, and wrote a book for families, “What Works for Bipolar Kids: Help and Hope for Parents.” Pavuluri began seeking NIMH funding in 2006 for research to examine the effects of lithium on children by imaging their brains before and after they took the mood stabi- lizer. The drug had long been used to treat bipolar disorder in adults, but its effective- ness in children was less understood. Pavuluri’s early requests for funding were denied. During reviews and consultations with NIMH staff, Pavuluri was “made keenly aware of critical human subjects issues,” records show. Those issues included the “significant risk”of providing lithium to chil- dren under 13 and the importance, in this study, of not providing direct medical care to the research subjects.The roles of researcher and clinician, according to documents, were supposed to be separate so the treatment of the children wouldn’t be influenced by the needs of the study. She amended the application to resolve NIMH’s concerns. UIC got the $3.1 million “Pavuluri, 55, recently filed paperwork to retire in June. The decision came after a meeting with her supervisors to discuss the NIMH decision, records show, and after ProPublica Illinois began asking UIC about the matter.”