‘Outgoing’ 9-Year-Old Changes ‘Overnight’ into Angry Person Parents Don’t Recognize. Then Gets a Shocking Diagnosis

In the spring of 2023, Crystal Loos began noticing something was off with her daughter. The once bubbly elementary schooler seemed distracted and started pulling away from school, friends, and everyday life.

Loos, an Illinois mother of three, says her daughter, Lacy Mae, stopped eating foods she previously enjoyed. At first, Loos assumed it was anxiety or depression.

“Before this, she was the happiest, funniest, most outgoing child ever. She never had any issues,” Loos, 30, says.

Then, in July 2024, everything escalated.

“It was a complete overnight change,” Loos explains. Her daughter — then 9 — no longer felt like “herself.”

Although Lacy Mae was diagnosed with anxiety and depression, Loos says the explanations didn’t match what she was seeing.

“They tried to put her on SSRIs, they tried to get her into a psychiatrist, psychologist, everything,” she says. “But I just felt that there was something deeper going on.”

Loos describes one night in July as a turning point.

“That night… it was like she had a psychotic break,” she says. “She was banging on my door. She was begging to go to the hospital. She knew something was wrong, but she didn’t know what… It was just like she didn’t have control over her brain.”

In the days that followed, Loos says her daughter barely slept, became paranoid, and repeatedly pleaded to be taken to the hospital.

“It was utter terror, like she wasn’t herself,” Loos recalls. “She had dilated pupils. You looked at her, and she just wasn’t the same kid… it was like something took over her.”

They went to multiple hospitals, but Loos says the response was largely the same: depression and anxiety.

Her daughter, she says, became desperate to be admitted to a psychiatric unit.

“She’s 10 years old, so that’s crazy, obviously, but she just wanted her health to get fixed,” Loos says. “She begged, begged, begged to be admitted… She was, at this point, suicidal.”

Loos says there were moments the family had to physically intervene to keep everyone safe.

“We had to sometimes hold her down because she was trying to hurt herself or us,” she says. “Sometimes we would have to lock her and us in a room together so that she wouldn’t. She was more of a danger to herself than us.”

At the time, Loos was recently postpartum, and she says her parents stepped in to help.

“Eventually, she did have to move in with my parents because I had a newborn baby, and then I also have a 5-year-old,” she says. “And my 5-year-old was just terrified of her… Rage is what I could describe her. She had so much rage in her.”

Lacy Mae refused to eat, stopped going to school, and missed most of fourth grade. Some people suggested the family’s new baby might be triggering the changes — but Loos says the behavior was far beyond typical adjustment issues.

“I’m like, ‘You guys don’t get it,’” she says. “She was running away from home. She was trying to jump out of moving cars, like just complete psychosis.”

Eventually, Lacy Mae was admitted to a behavioral health unit. While her daughter was there, Loos began searching for other parents who had experienced anything similar. She joined Facebook groups, asked questions, and started hearing a term she hadn’t known before: PANS/PANDAS.

She dove into research and returned to the children’s hospital psychiatrist with a direct request.

“I literally begged,” she says. “I said, ‘She has something wrong with her. I think this is what it is: PANS / PANDAS. Can we do any further workup?’ They refused to do that.”

According to the Stanford University School of Medicine, Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome (PANS) is a clinical diagnosis in children who “have a dramatic – sometimes overnight – onset of neuropsychiatric symptoms,” often marked by sudden obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCD) or eating restrictions, alongside possible depression, irritability, anxiety, sleep disruption, behavioral regression, and difficulty with schoolwork.

Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections (PANDAS) is considered a subset of PANS. The PANDAS Physicians Network outlines five diagnostic criteria, including abrupt onset OCD or severe tics, an episodic course, young age of onset, neurologic abnormalities, and a recent streptococcal infection.

Because there is no single official test for PANS/PANDAS, Loos says it took time — and persistence — to find a clinician willing to evaluate her daughter from that lens.

She ultimately took Lacy Mae out of the psychiatric unit and searched for a specialist. The family contacted Indiana-based specialist Dr. Antoine, and in September 2024, Loos says in-depth blood work led to an official diagnosis.

Treatment included antibiotics and IVIG (Intravenous Immunoglobulin), which is sometimes used to help regulate immune response.

“She had different infections in her body that were mistakenly attacking her brain,” Loos says. “She had a tick-borne illness. She had mycoplasma… pneumonia… and these are all things that Dr. Antoine checked for. That’s how we figured out what was going on.”

Loos says her daughter was placed on antibiotics to address the infections and to help regulate the immune system, along with IVIG and supplements.

Slowly, Loos says, her daughter began to improve — and by December 2024, she started recognizing the child she knew.

“We started to see her again,” Loos says.

While setbacks still happened, she says the episodes became less severe over time.

“I was having just so much anxiety through all this because I was like, I don’t know what to do,” she says. “I can’t even describe how bad it was. It was literally like a living hell.”

Loos says Lacy Mae was also prescribed an antipsychotic to help calm her, and that now — just over a year after diagnosis — her daughter is “99%” back to herself.

“She does have some setbacks and a little bit of anxiety here and there,” Loos says, “but for the most part… she has been thriving, and life is pretty much back to normal.”

Loos says her daughter is back in school, playing sports, and spending time with friends again.

“She goes to school. She plays sports. She plays with her friends, which she hasn’t done for a while,” she says. “Now she’s completely back to living life and enjoying life again.”

Recently, Loos shared a TikTok video showing the contrast in her daughter before and after treatment to raise awareness of PANS/PANDAS. The video went viral, reaching more than 45 million views.

Since then, she says parents have messaged her with stories that sound familiar — sudden behavioral shifts, frightening symptoms, and few clear answers. She’s connected many of them with resources and support.

“I want parents to get answers,” she says. “I want them to know that this is a thing and something to look into if your child has similar symptoms. I wish I would have found it sooner, before our life got really hard with it.”

She says the isolation was one of the hardest parts.

“When we were going through this, I was really struggling because I didn’t feel like I could find other parents that were dealing with this,” she says. “It’s very, very lonely… and there’s just not a lot out there.”

Now, Loos says her focus is on education — because she believes the condition is often overlooked.

“It’s not widely known,” she says, adding, “Although I think it’s honestly not a rare diagnosis. It’s more common than we think. I think it’s just often misdiagnosed as other things.”