In August, he was institutionalized for a month at a public hospital in Georgia. There he was put on 20 milligrams a day of Zyprexa, a relatively high dose.

The Zyprexa, along with the Depakote, which he was still taking, stabilized his illness. But the drugs also left him severely sedated, hardly able to talk, his mother said.

"He was so tired and he slept so much," Beik said. "He loved Shakespeare, and he was an avid reader in high school. At the end of his life, it was so sad, he couldn't read a page."

In addition, his health and hygiene deteriorated. In the 1990 newspaper profile, Kauffman had called himself extremely well-organized. But after 2000, he became slovenly, his mother said. He spent most days in his apartment smoking.

A therapist who treated Kauffman while he was taking Zyprexa recalls him as seeming shy and sad. "He was intelligent enough to have the sense that his life hadn't panned out in a normal fashion," the therapist said in an interview. "He always reminded me of a person standing outside a house with a party going on, looking at it."

The therapist spoke on the condition that her name not be used because of rules covering the confidentiality of discussions with psychiatric patients.

As late as 2004, Kauffman prepared a simple one-page resume of his spotty work history — evidence that he perhaps hoped to re-enter the work force. He never did.

As Kauffman's weight increased from 2000 to 2006, he began to suffer from other health problems, including high blood pressure. In December 2005, a doctor ordered him to stop smoking, and he did. But in early 2006, he began to tell his parents that he was having hallucinations of people appearing in his apartment.

On March 16, a psychiatrist increased his dose of Zyprexa to 30 milligrams, a very high level.

That decision may have been a mistake, doctors say. Ending smoking causes the body to metabolize Zyprexa more slowly, and so Kauffman might have actually needed a lower rather than higher dose.

A few days later, Kauffman spoke to his mother for the last time. By March 26, they had been out of contact for several days. That was unusual, and she feared he might be in trouble. She drove to his apartment building in Decatur the next day and convinced the building's manager to check Kauffman's apartment. He was dead, his body already beginning to decompose.

An autopsy paid for by his mother and conducted by a private forensic pathologist showed he had died of an irregular heartbeat — probably, the report said, as the result of an enlarged heart caused by his history of high blood pressure.

Beik acknowledged she cannot be certain that Zyprexa caused her son's death. But the weight gain it produced was likely a contributing factor, she said. And she is angry that Eli Lilly downplayed the risks of Zyprexa. The company should have been more honest with doctors, as well as the millions of people who take Zyprexa, she said.

Instead Lilly has marketed Zyprexa as safer and more effective than older drugs, despite scant evidence, psychiatrists say.

Beik notes that Stelazine — an older drug that is no longer widely used even though a federally financed clinical trial showed it works about as well as Zyprexa — stabilized Kauffman's illness for eight years without causing him to gain weight.

"He was on other drugs that worked," she said.