Mysterious Childhood Diagnosis Led To The Darkest Of Thoughts And Feelings, But In Recovery O'Brien Found A Track And Field Event To Express Her Relentless Drive

By David Woods for DyeStat

David Woods/Tavan Smith photos (NCAAs)

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- No one knew what was wrong with little Jadin.

Not psychiatrists or physicians. Not parents or siblings. Not teachers or friends. Not even an exorcist.

Certainly not the 10-year-old Catholic girl herself. All she could think was that she was going to hell or should take her own life. If she did that, she reasoned, her six brothers and sisters would stay alive.

Jadin O’Brien, at 22, has become a three-time NCAA champion at Notre Dame and potential Olympian in track and field’s heptathlon . . . or in bobsled. She has overcome injury to every part of her body, and once she nearly had a titanium rod inserted in her leg.

Yet it is her mind that has healed most emphatically.

As a child, she was diagnosed with PANDAS -- Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections. It is a rare condition, and not universally agreed upon, in which children develop neuropsychiatric symptoms following a streptococcal infection. Commonly known as strep, the infection affects the throat and tonsils but can spread elsewhere and cause serious complications.

Jadin’s symptoms worsened from the ages of 5 to 10, until her parents finally found a doctor willing to put their daughter through holistic treatments.

The strep was eliminated. Jadin came back.

“I would describe it as I got a light in my eye again,” she said. “I was able to look at life and be interested in things, smile with people and talk to people, and actually think without being absolutely terrified of everything.”

And now?

Her pentathlon score ranked fourth in the world this year, and would have been nearly enough for a bronze medal at the World Indoor Championships. Her stated goal at Notre Dame has been not victory, but legacy.

“We’ve started to see attributes of a world-class athlete,” said Rodney Zuyderwyk, her coach.

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Jadin, of Pewaukee, Wis., is the second of seven children born to Kevin O’Brien and Leslie (Moorman) O’Brien. It is an athletic family. A sister, Caitlyn, 21, won an NAIA long jump title just days before Jadin won a third NCAA indoor pentathlon at Virginia Beach.

The parents met at Bowling Green University. Her father was a linebacker who signed with a couple of NFL teams and played in the World League and Canadian Football League. Her mother belongs to Ohio’s track hall of fame, winning four state titles during an unbeaten career in the 300-meter hurdles.

Jadin’s mother, who coached her in the hurdles, knew her daughter could be a track star. As soon as Jadin was walking, she was running. She sought greatness, as her parents did.

“Being the naturally hyper-driven person that I am, this PANDAS stuff affected me in the way I couldn’t stop working out,” she said. “I would push myself to exhaustion, to absolute burnout all the time.

“Not being able to stop has actually stayed with me, like, since that point until now.”

There is film of Jadin, at age 7, skimming tiny hurdles in the basement as if the technique were natural. She would have been recruited in basketball, in which she led her high school team to a Wisconsin final four, or soccer.

Unbeknownst to her parents, Jadin developed strep as a child. PANDAS symptoms -- obsessive-compulsive disorder, tics, depression, sleep disturbances, motor or sensory problems – occurred in her as early as age 5. Thoughts about death surfaced, before children usually know what death is.

“ ‘You should drop your baby brother, and he’s going to die.’ Things like that,” she said. “That absolutely terrified me.”

The once-bubbly girl became increasingly withdrawn.  Jadin said friends thought she was “weird” but did not abandon her.

Younger siblings were largely shielded from their sister’s mysterious behavior. Jadin shared a room with Caitlyn, who knew something was wrong.

“Seeing those parts of Jadin, it breaks me,” Caitlyn said.

They were once one anpther’s best friend, as they are now. They couldn’t be then. The sisters couldn’t really speak to each other.

“She couldn’t. She couldn’t do any of that,” Caitlyn said.

Jadin’s dark thoughts persisted. She thought she was a bad person destined for hell.

Her movements became choppy. She could “step there, but you can’t step there,” she said. Otherwise, something bad would happen, someone would die. She repeatedly washed her hands, causing the skin to dry and crack.

“Terror was a constant feeling I felt daily,” she said. “As a kid, I mean, that shouldn’t happen. It was terror in every aspect of my life.”

Jadin compared her condition to the character in the movie Ella Enchanted, in which an angry fairy godmother casts a spell requiring Ella to obey any command. The only way to avoid going to hell, Jadin thought, would be to do everything she was asked.

“ ‘Jadin, get me a cookie.’ Anything my parents asked me to do,” she said. “I couldn’t stop doing what people asked me to do.”

Fifth grade was the worst.

Her mother remembers Jadin standing in front of the closet, unable to pick out clothes or dress herself. The girl stood and stared. She could not turn the handle to the shower.

She took notes in school but intentionally made the writing illegible. If it were a clear sentence, she recalled, she thought someone in her family would die. Her writing, reading, test-taking were “just trash,” Jadin said.

Teachers said it was unacceptable. Snap out of it, they told her.

“For me, I couldn’t. Like, I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t,” Jadin said.

She said her Catholic faith influenced how she processed what was happening.

She once tried to carve the sign of the cross on her forehead using a metal spike from a sprinkler head. It was done in secret, she said, because she didn’t want her parents to know. In the coldest part of winter, she remembers sleeping on top of bedcovers, shivering, because she thought God wanted that.

She began speaking to herself in a deep voice, as if it were God’s voice. She was seeking survival, a way to make it through the day.

“Somehow, it turned on me, where God would be like, ‘Jadin, I want you to cut yourself with that sharp edge, just to show that you love me,’ “ she said. “ ‘I want you to jump off that ledge to show you love me.’

“Growing up, I would hear stories of martyrs. People have literally died for their faith. If they can do that, then this must be God telling me that I should be doing this because He let other people die for their faith.”

The running and jumping vanished. So did the laughs and smiles.

Go to college? That was out of the question. Jadin did not think she would live that long.

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Jadin was possessed . . .  but not, as it turned out, by the devil.

She was taken to a priest, Father Cliff Ermatinger, the exorcist of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. He prayed over her.

“Nothing happened,” Jadin said, “because I wasn’t possessed.”

A psychiatrist mentioned speaking to a witch, and that “didn’t feel right at all,” the mother said. PANDAS remains a subject of debate in the medical world because there is no diagnostic test to confirm PANDAS, and the diagnostic criteria are unevenly applied.

For Jadin, it was all too real.

Intercessory prayer for her was ceaseless.

Her paternal grandfather, too, noticed the inexplicable behavior. One day, at Mass, as he passed in front of a stained glass window in church, he felt a voice speak to him:

Jadin is going to be fine.

It was startling, Jadin’s mother said, because the grandfather does not say such things. She asked him to identify who was on the stained glass, and he returned to see it was Therese of Lisieux, a saint often invoked on behalf of the sick and Jadin’s role model.

Things were moving, Jadin’s mother said.

A teacher at Jadin’s small Pewaukee school, Trinity Academy, told the family about a friend whose son had similar symptoms. A holistic doctor tested the girl for strep. Not only was the strep there, Jadin said, it was everywhere.

“Liver, bladder and gut,” she said.

Gut health affects mental health. Antibiotics and a natural treatment killed off the strep within eight weeks, the mother said.

The family realized healing was virtually complete during a May father/daughter dance around Jadin’s 11th birthday. It was beautiful, and it was authentic Jadin.

“Before, it almost seemed like she was dead inside. She had no soul,” Caitlyn said.

“Our whole family dynamic switched. You can see the little Jadin coming back.”

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It would be a mischaracterization to assert Jadin O’Brien is a happily-ever-after story. Her journey is ongoing. It has featured twists and turns, peaks and valleys.

She said she can’t identify a specific moment in which she felt normal. It was gradual.

“I was skeptical, really, that it was going to work,” she said.

And there was so much more life to live.

For instance, she once thought she would play college soccer. After a hot and steamy summer camp at Notre Dame, she decided to quit that sport before high school. And, by the way, she would certainly never enroll at Notre Dame, she said.

Basketball became a source of joy.

She once sank a 60-foot heave at the buzzer to lift Divine Savior Holy Angels over unbeaten Germantown 66-64. As a senior in 2020, she led her 23-3 team to the Division I final four. She had 19 points and 19 rebounds in the victory sending the Dashers to state.

After the team arrived in Green Bay, the state tournament was canceled because of the pandemic. End of career. End of dream season.

“It was absolutely heartbreaking,” O’Brien said.

There was no 2020 track season, either. Not that COVID could interrupt training. She would run in place on her bed, jumping from one bed to another, performing high jump and long jump drills – yes, on the beds.

After a league meet in her sophomore year, a local coach suggested O’Brien, already a  state champion in the 300-meter hurdles, try a heptathlon. He would prepare her for it. Her response: “I never heard of the heptathlon.”

In July 2018, she won the under-17 AAU Junior Olympics with 4,777 points at Des Moines, Iowa. A year later, she was third in the USATF U20 Championships with 5,167 points at Miramar, Fla.

And she was a heptathlete thereafter: 100-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200 meters, long jump, javelin, 800 meters.

“Every aspect of what it takes to be a heptathlete, I can do well,” Jadin  said. “For me, I’m built to be able to do all of those things. Again, I’m still learning. I’m still young in the event, young overall.

“But I also think my drive, my relentlessness to be the best, I think it’s going to carry me far. Very far.”

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The litany of injuries Jadin has endured is enough to fill a Notre Dame class on human anatomy: torn quadriceps, strained hamstring, stress fractures in shins, plantar fasciitis, patellar tendinitis, sprained hand, torn elbow ligament

At one point, she said, she couldn’t lift weights because of her arm and couldn’t run because of her legs. Training amounted to visualization of what she would do – and she did win a NCAA pentathlon that way.

“My whole life, really, has been overcoming odds,” she said. “Overcoming things that should have stopped me but didn’t, and actually fueled me.”

In sharing a room, Jadin and Caitlyn spoke to each other every night, and about everything. The younger sister has been a sounding board and therapist.

Separated now during college – Caitlyn attends Ave Maria (Fla.) University – the sisters continue their close connection. Jadin has called in the middle of competitions, tearful and despairing.

Caitlyn remembers one midnight call representing “the worst day of my life.” Jadin, injured again, spoke of suicide. She used words like worthless, alone and forgotten.

Was it Jadin speaking, or was it latent PANDAS?

“There’s definitely some deep scars that I’ve covered up that aren’t fully healed,” she said.

Caitlyn encouraged her sister to open up about mental struggles. Jadin first shared her PANDAS story for a 17-minute documentary, “Offering It Up,” produced by Notre Dame.

Her sister told her:

“Jadin, you have to let people know you are a real person. Not a person with a mask on.”

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This year has been like no other. Jadin has been healthy -- physically, mentally, spiritually.

It has been a window not only into what she has done, but what she could do.

She won the ACC pentathlon with 4,580 points, winning all five events. She won NCAAs with what she called an “easy” 4,596.

O’Brien became No. 5 on the all-time collegiate list, and three of the four ahead of her are global medalists. She became the fourth to win three or more NCAA pentathlons, and the others are Olympians.

“That’s where I see myself,” she said. “I should be with them.”

In her heptathlon opener April 11-12, she scored 6,231 -- just three points off her score in finishing seventh at the 2024 Olympic Trials. She ranks third in the NCAA, fifth in the world. She has run a personal best of 13.22 seconds in the 100-meter hurdles to rank second in the ACC in that event.

She does not have an agent yet but is speaking to potential sponsors, such as Under Armour, which has a licensing agreement with Notre Dame.

It is plausible she could become a summer and winter Olympian.

USA Bobsled is recruiting her as a push athlete, and she could try out for Milano Cortina 2026, then prepare for Los Angeles 2028. Other American women from track and field have won global medals in bobsled, notably hurdler Lolo Jones and sprinter Lauryn Williams.

After disclosing the PANDAS trauma, Jadin said, she was thanked by respondents on social media. For someone who portrays herself as “hard as rock,” it was a vulnerability she doesn’t ordinarily show. She said she doesn’t often dwell on that period of her life because she doesn’t know what might surface.

“I think if I actually  unpacked what happened and then kind of look at it and see how it’s affected my life now, I’d find some interesting things,” she said. “But I guess I look at it now like what good has come from it.

“I would say the resilience part, the story, being a witness, being a hope for people.”

Now everyone knows her legacy.

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More information on PANDAS is available at www.pandasnetwork.org or iocdf.org/pandas. For those struggling with thoughts of suicide, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline can be reached by calling or texting 988.

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Contact David Woods at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidWoods007.