Home detention for nurse who secretly drugged daughter

A nurse who secretly gave her daughter anti-psychotic drugs that were not prescribed for her had a warped sense of doing the right thing, a judge has said.

The woman, who cannot be named, was sentenced in the Wellington District Court yesterday, after pleading guilty to charges of mistreating a child.

She took home risperidone, an anti-psychotic drug with potentially serious side effects, from her work at a district health board in the Wellington region, and hid them in her daughter’s yoghurt in mid-2015.

The drugs, which had not been prescribed for the girl, caused her to fall asleep in class, and led to her being in the sick bay three to five times a week.

In July 2015, the girl was admitted to hospital in what was described as a ‘‘very abnormal state’’. She was confused and had slurred speech. During her stay, her mother, 37, was in her room with her, and continued to give her risperidone without telling doctors.

The girl’s condition worsened and she was taken to hospital in Christchurch, where she was monitored, and soon got better.

But as soon as she went back to her local hospital, her mother again started giving her the antipsychotic drug, as well as naltrexone, a prescription-only drug used to treat alcoholism and opioid addictions.

The drugs were detected in toxicology tests, and the woman admitted she had been giving the girl risperidone for six to eight weeks.

She told doctors she had been frustrated with the medical help given to the girl, and thought the drug had appeared to help her anxiety, and reduced seizures.

The child had been taken to a large number of appointments with a range of specialists from an early age, with her mother telling doctors the girl was suffering from seizures. She had been prescribed anti-convulsant drugs a number of times between 2011 and 2015, despite tests finding nothing wrong with the child.

In sentencing the mother, Judge Denys Barry noted she had an entirely clean criminal record, and had suffered underlying mental health illness, compounded by a miscarriage before the birth of her daughter. He sentenced her to six months’ home detention, and 150 hours’ community work.

He said it was a unique case, tied up with the woman’s mental ill health, and her warped sense of doing the right thing by the child, by ‘‘ongoing subterfuge’’ behind the backs of her clinicians.

The woman would be given access to her children by arrangements through the Family Court, or the Ministry for Vulnerable Children, Oranga Tamariki.