" I know this is a very long article to read...Heck I cut it down it was 5-pages long. But I wanted to post this to let people out their know, and also because I also have two-children that 10-years ago was told had 3rd.genertion Bi-polar on their dad's side, I also did not know their father had this because he was adopted, his parents thought he was just a un-rule kids and sent him to live else where till he was grown. Guess what I am saying is. It's really hard to live with kids that have these problems and others don't understand! Explicitly those people that never had to raise a child like these kids. Because as their parent you try to do everything you can to give them a good life and make sure their happy, but at the same time it seems like someone is always un-happy no matter what you try to do. And people and the legal system think we are bad parents because our kids are out of control. People don't begin to know the hell we go thru...From a mothers view, be wait nine months to hold our child and when their born they are the best gift anyone could give us, then the hell begins, maybe not as soon for soon like some but it comes. Mine was when my son entered kinder-garden. I know the stares the rude remarks from outsiders, and all the people that feel if you took one million parenting classes you would be a better parent. Well let me tell you and their is proof out their. But the courts and schools don't want to listen, And doctors they don't seem to know much more then the rest of us...God help the world! But- they just want to blame someone, so it's us the parent. I feel that we as parents are doing every thing we can to help and love our child but the legal system and the schools, don't do enough, these people are not trained nor are payed enough to deal with these type of children so, why should they.. they feel right! Wrong these people want to take our rights as parents away and say we don't know what going on...Well I sure wish they would show us how to fix it...Instead of always telling us how. Sure would help some days....Well I feel better now...LOL Got that out of my system- Sort of. I just get so angry because I am trying so hard to be a good parent and some days I just want to walk away, and give up. As I"m a single mom, their dads visits, but he don't want to deal with it...Great huh!"
washingtonpost:"From the time her son was born, this mother suspected something was wrong. As an infant he cried inconsolably and slept mostly in hour-long snatches. At 3, he was always irritable and had prolonged tantrums triggered by the slightest change in his routine. A therapist told his mother he was emotionally disturbed. A year later a child psychiatrist made the diagnosis: the 4 1/2 -year-old was manic-depressive. A few months later, when his even-tempered sister grew moody and volatile, she took her to the same psychiatrist. They sat down with DeWeese's well-thumbed book about bipolar children and went through its symptom checklist. Based largely on those results and the family's history she learned that the children's father had been diagnosed as bipolar in high school psychiatrist told her 5 1/2-year-old daughter was bipolar,too. Now 6 and 8, this mother's son and daughter exemplify a trend that is roiling mental heath: the burgeoning number of children diagnosed with bipolar illness, also known as manic depression, which affects about 2.3 million Americans. As a result, some preschoolers barely out of diapers are being treated for bipolar disorder with powerful drugs, few of which have been tested in children. But some experts say the surge in diagnoses is a dangerous fad one critic called it "psychiatrist flavor of the month" a decision too often based on skimpy evidence, cursory evaluations and incorrect assumptions about genetic risk. These children are troubled,but most don't meet psychiatrist official diagnostic criteria for the lifelong psychotic disorder. Labeling severe tantrums in toddlers as a major mental illness lacks validity and undermines credibility in our profession. Studies have found that bipolar children are severely agitated and aggressive, grandiose(they tell the teacher how to run the class or think they have the same authority as a parent),hypersexual,imitate sexy rock stars,silliness, separation anxiety, night terrors, carbohydrate cravings, fidgeting, extreme bossiness, bed-wetting, lying, social anxiety and difficulty getting up in the morning, or use explicit language and experience very rapid mood swings, sometimes several times an hour, during which they can become explosively angry. They are also suggestive of a host of other problems: depression, anxiety, abuse, ADHD or a behavioral problem such as conduct, explosive or oppositional defiant disorder. Desperate parents search Web sites. It has been found, famous people were bipolar, Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig van Beethoven and Teddy Roosevelt. With systems of rapid cycling mood swings that occur as often as every few minutes throughout the day. Some desperate parents, who have struggled for years with their children's problems and an acute shortage of mental health feel so helpless.Until recently, many doctors were reluctant to prescribe the powerful mood-stabilizing drugs adults take for bipolar disorder to young children, whose central nervous systems are still developing. Most of these drugs, which can have serious and sometimes life-threatening side effects, including diabetes, significant weight gain, hormonal problems that can cause infertility, and fatal blood disorders have not been tested in children. Some are epilepsy drugs used to control seizures and not approved to treat psychiatric disorders, which are widely used anyway because some doctors think they are effective. These medications doctors say, are the cornerstone of treatment, even for very young children. The youngest patient heard of is an 18-month-old girl who was diagnosed as bipolar largely because she screamed incessantly and had a bipolar mother. The baby was medicated with lithium. Most children take at least three drugs simultaneously or more to control their moods and alleviate depression. Some try dozens of combinations and doses. One 8-year old, who has tried more than half a dozen drugs, some of which made her act like "a raging maniac," currently takes Abilify, an antipsychotic primarily used to treat schizophrenia in adults. The dose had to be cut after she started drooling and one side of her face drooped. Parents are often asked how they can give these drugs to their children. "We don't have any choice," comparing them to lifesaving chemotherapy. "Most of us are grateful these medications exist. In earlier days our children would have been institutionalized. These drugs can cause the very symptoms they have been given to treat: hyperactivity, insomnia and even psychosis. There's a lot of throwing medications at people without thinking about what the problem is. Once somebody has a label, it is highly unlikely that label will be questioned. And by the time your child has been on 20 different drugs, you can no longer figure out what's wrong. One 13-year-old had taken more than a dozen drugs since her diagnosis several years ago. If one doesn't work, the doctors' answer is to just keep adding more and more medications or increasing the doses, the rise in pediatric diagnosis of bipolar illness. Don't Blame the Parents, many parents say that a bipolar diagnosis meant they were no longer blamed for their children's behavior. At first he only had meltdowns in front of me, recalled a Navy scientist whose son was diagnosed last year at 5. Everyone told me it was me, that I was just not handling him well. It was the most horrible thing to sit there every day and have people telling you that. It is not a parenting issue, she said she finds it hard to ignore the stares when her 6-year-old son, diagnosed at 3, has a meltdown in Wal-Mart. We can't stop this from happening. It is nothing we can control or the child can control Such evaluations can take four hours or more and includes interviews and observations of the parents and child, psychological testing, a physical exam, detailed family history and information from teachers, coaches, day care staffers and others who know the child. A psychiatrist can make two or three times as much from an hour of medication checks than from an hour of therapy.Although it's not discussed much, misdiagnosis can have a profound impact. One woman, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her name not be published to protect her daughter's privacy, said that when the girl was 14, she was handed a prescription for lithium after a single visit to a psychiatrist. Four years later, doctors discovered that her severe depression and mood swings were the result of an undiagnosed pituitary tumor. She's really angry at the doctors and at me because I accepted the diagnosis too fast, the woman said. Her daughter, she said, "barely got through high school" and had side effects from the lithium, which made her hair fall out. Now 19, she said, her daughter is caught in a Catch-22: Because the family was open about her diagnosis, she feels the need to tell everyone she's not bipolar. And the reaction she's encountered is not what she thought. It's, Oh sure- (people say)- the bipolar doesn't think she's bipolar-right...Tell her to up her meads."
