AKA Parent’s Refusal To Believe
Here’s the other side of the coin. As karma would have it (and because I used to run with a much wilder crowd), I have a couple of friends that I have known for many years who have sons that are grown now. I have known these boys since they were very little. Man, I’m getting old. Anyway, in both cases the parents were told that the sons were/are bipolar and the parents refused to believe it. They both believe the kids just needed a good knot jerked in their chain and they’d be ok. Here’s how those stories go:
Friend A:
Boy A is raised in a stable, loving home with both biological parents that have been married boy A’s entire life. Boy A starts to get in trouble with the law about 12 or 13 years old. He has been a completely docile child up until this point with no problems in school or at home. The first incident starts and it is a vandalizing incident. Because the incident occurs at a high end golf course, the owners of the course are not letting go and file charges. The kids (there were 2 of them) are required to pay restitution and are put on probation. Around this time a girlfriend comes into the picture. Mom and dad allow the boy, who has always been trustworthy prior to this time, to have a lot of freedom with the girl. She is older, 14. Girlfriend and boy date for a while and start experimenting with drugs and girlfriend, they now find out, might be pregnant. Girl is now 15 and boy is 13. Parents are horrified. It turns out not to be true but the incidents increase from there. Boy has big time issues in school. Commits another crime of some kind and is displaying erratic behavior so is sent to mental institution. Boy is diagnosed as bipolar. Parents don’t believe it. Boy comes home and gets into more trouble. He is sent to juvenile detention. Comes home again and progresses to harder drugs. Boy never receives mental health services except while in the hospital. Boy stops going to school. Is expelled. Continues to bounce from home to juvenile detention to mental institutions with involuntary commitments. Diagnosed bipolar 2 or 3 different times. Disappears for days at a time. Parents are convinced his biggest issue is he is addicted to street drugs. Boy is in and out of the home. Boy finally commits a criminal act that gets him prison time. He is now 18 and going to prison for 2-5 years. I lost touch with these friends around this time. I wonder how he is doing now.
Friend B:
Boy B is raised in stable, loving home with bio mom and step dad that have been married since Boy B was a baby (bio dad is not in picture). Boy B is fine until middle school. Boy starts hanging out with bad crowd. Boy is an incredibly gifted athlete and parents spend endless time and money fostering his athletic ability in hopes of him getting an athletic scholarship to a big name college. Boy is hanging with some bad kids though. Boy starts getting into trouble. Boy continues his sport and excels in it but at 16 boy starts displaying some extremely erratic behavior that could cost him his life and the law gets involved and then mental services are involved. Boy is diagnosed as bipolar. Parents refuse to believe. Boy spends the next few years in and out of court ordered boys camps and juvenile detention. Chances of a college scholarship to a four year university are now gone. Boy is about to turn 18 and is incarcerated so parents send boy to a prison diversion program to ‘clean up and learn how to live’. Prison diversion program won’t accept people with a mental illness diagnosis (because God knows of the thousands of people they house and help every year that were headed to or from incarceration or the streets surely none of them have a mental health diagnosis. Sounds feasible, right?) Anyway, because he is not bipolar they accept him. He starts at facility, which is completely across the country from parent’s home, but does not stay the length of time he committed to stay. Boy leaves facility and is missing for about a week nearly giving his parents a heart attack. I feel incredibly sorry for mom who is emotionally torn to pieces. Boy gets pro drug/drug related tattoo in a relatively visible location while out and about. Boy now has open warrant because he has not kept his legal commitment to the program he enrolled in. Boy comes home, pulls himself together enough to convince his parents he is ok and starts junior college in another state where he can play said sport for the junior college (he got his GED while at boys camp). Boy now attends junior college, plays his sport, but still has open warrant in other state.
Now, who knows what will happen here. Time will tell. Hopefully this turns out for the best as this is a friend I love dearly. And hopefully this turns out ok as this is a kid with a ton of potential. He is athletic, good looking, personable, intelligent. All of it. But I wonder how he would have fared on a mood stabilizer. Would this have helped avoid this history? We will never know.
__________
Are these boys bipolar? I don’t know. They were both diagnosed as being bipolar.
And I do know this, if being on a mood stabilizer will help us avoid this fate, I am all for it. I love both of these kids and their parents dearly. I think even they realize, though, it’s hard to overcome a history like this. Can it be done? Of course it can. And I hope in both of their cases that is what happens. But more than what these experiences do and reflect in the external world, as that is the simplest part to correct, these experiences pay a price on one’s soul and self image. And that’s the hardest piece to overcome.
10 Comments
So true…. As you know, I didn’t get diagnosed until I was an adult, but looking back, I think it might have helped me to be on a mood stabalizer during my teen years.
“if being on a mood stabilizer will help us avoid this fate, I am all for it.”
As a mother you would have to be in favour of a medicine.
Remembering this is a MALE perspective, I would disagree, I do not think it is medicine, because emotions are not a disease.
Children scream when emotional and are supposed to scream until they learn to calm themselves as in “grow up”. Only legal adults are supposed to have a stable mood, thats why they are called adults. Adults drink alcohol to get their surpressed feelings back.
A bit of jail time might be better than a life time of psychiatric drugs. People I know from the psychiatric hospital, believe they ARE mentally ill. They have been brainwashed. The people helping, such as social workers and psychologists around them are beating their heads against a brick wall because the brainwashed willingly take the psychiatric drugs that stop their brain from functioning.
Teenagers making/having babies, is what mother nature intended, propagating the human race. Young men do not have a chemical imbalance, they have testosterone in their bloodstream.
With testosterone you get action-motivation
No balls, no testosterone. You want them to be a girl?
testosterone graph here
http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/sex/common/ibank/ibank/0088.jpg
Mark, although I completely respect your right to not medicate yourself, I do think that emotions and thought processes that are out of control and therefore navigate the decisions of one’s life without common sense or forethought are a problem. Especially when one makes reckless or harmful decisions they would not make otherwise and come to greatly regret later. In both cases of these 2 teen boys (now men) they both became highly addicted to street drugs in their early teens and still are addicted. So they are medicated. And have been since their early teens. They are just self medicated and out of control. Until, of course, the judicial and penal system step in and control their life for them. Which has happened in both cases.
Meg, I am disappointed that comments are being moderated again as I just received that message in the medication thread.
Regarding the two kids you mentioned, it is certainly tragic, no question about that.
But there is so much information missing. We don’t know on what basis the bipolar diagnosis was made.
Also, criminal behavior does not equate to bipolar disorder.
Finally, you can’t assume that the meds would have prevented the criminal behavior as many psych meds actually cause people to commit crimes.
Just some thoughts.
Stephany and AA: No comments were being moderated by me. I have a very strong spam system and it apparently approved some and not others while I was spending time with my family and then sleeping last night. I went ahead and manually approved them now.
Thanks Meg for following up on that.
We understand you do have a life outside this blog.
It was just frustrating to write a long message and then be told it was too spammy.
Anyway, thanks for giving us a forum to express our opinions, even ones that may be unpopular.
“out of control” you get to the root of the problem. Who has control? Tell me?
Their brains are defective?
Ultimately the laws of our society have control based on one’s behavior. One can have whatever kind of brain they want as long as they can take responsibility for themselves and act within legal limits. If one’s self or brain or whatever you want to call it cannot or will not choose to make decisions to engage in behaviors that are within the legal limits of our society, then the legal and penal systems will remove one’s right to decide things for themselves.
“as long as they can take responsibility for themselves”
Thats where it gets F’ed when the children are raised on DRUGS, legal ones called “medication” .
It is a set up for their children to fail, as the child has not learnt how to control themselves and cope with lifes difficulties.
The king gets to stay king, and the queen gets to stay queen, and the children stay children.
Society is going to harvest these seeds they have planted.
http://www.epmonthly.com/whitecoat/2010/04/the-medications-worked/
Mark: I see your point. I also think it is important for kids to make mistakes and fall and learn to control themselves and cope with life’s difficulties. I can’t speak for anyone else but in our house Rye has a huge amount of freedom to make his own decisions, make mistakes, etc. The part that concerns me is that for him there it that there are parts of his emotional life he can’t control no matter how hard he tries (and he will tell you the same thing) and that is why he has a bipolar diagnosis. Life is not fun if you get so high/manic you can’t come down no matter what you do and everyone around you is starting to get freaked out. You lose friends, you lose opportunities and you lose self esteem. And you get a lot of anxiety because you don’t know when it will happen and when it won’t. That leads to a poor quality of life and I’d like to see Rye have a good quality of life where he can do what he wants to do, how he wants to do it and when he wants to do it. I actually want him to have control of his own life and that’s why I think a mood stabilizer may help him.