Raising Bipolar

So, AA and Sherry’s comments got me thinking about learning disabilities which then got me thinking about their effect on emotional regulation.  Rye is quite learning disabled.  We have not had him testing recently but we know from previous testing that he has significant dyselxia, short term memory problems as well as processing disorders (auditory at a minimum) that greatly affect his interpretation of the world and cause him great difficulty in school and in life in general.  I often wonder if these learning disabilities, and not bipolar disorder, are the cause of his emotional lability.   It’s hard to know.

According to this document, The Five Emotional Difficulties of People with Learning Disabilities, people with these disabilities often have the following struggles:

Some people with learning disabilities have isolated difficulties in reading, writing or mathematics.  However, most people with learning disabilities have more than one area of difficulty. Dr. Larry Silver asserts that  “learning disabilities are life disabilities”.  He writes,  “The same disabilities that interfere with reading, writing, and arithmetic also will interfere with sports and other activities, family life, and getting along with friends.” (Silver, 1998)

Typically, students with LD have other major difficulties in one or more of the following areas:

Rye has all of the difficulties listed with the exception of  the social skills part with regard to making and keeping friends.

A good example of his struggles would be just the other day he was talking about a friend to me with the friend standing there with us and Rye kept saying “her” mom, “her” house, etc. in reference to the friend. The friend finally jumped in and said, “Um, do you think I could be referred to as a ‘him’?” (it was a guy).  Rye had not even noticed he was referring to the guy as a girl. It must to be frustrating to make these mistakes and be corrected all of the time.

The document also states the learning disabilities can be cause of emotional regulation issues.  It states:

Difficulties with regulating emotions are common for highly sensitive adults with learning disabilities. Dr. Kay Walker, describes the connection between learning disabilities and self-regulation problems in her paper “Self Regulation and Sensory Processing for Learning, Attention and Attachment”.  She asserts that self-regulation problems frequently occur in those with learning disabilities (Walker, 2000)  In its most extreme form, individual may easily shift from one emotion to the next. Others may experience difficulty regulating impulsive thoughts or actions.

Anyway, I’m not sure.  It’s hard to know.  Do the learning disabilities cause the emotional issues or do the learning disabilities and the emotional issues just go hand in hand as a form of brain impairment with some people (as obviously not all people with learning disabilities have the emotional issues part) or are the learning disabilities a part of the bipolar disorder (although that is interesting as well because not everyone with bipolar has learning disbilities)?

Who knows?

My guess is, like everything else, it varies from person to person.  And I wonder how you ever really know.