Please excuse Rye’s absence from school yesterday.  Due to the fact that you insist on mainstreaming bipolar children and refuse to acknowledge children with emotional disabilities as being worthy of any significant amount of additional assistance in the public school setting, Rye is now completely stressed by your school environment and spent the day at home with me fighting off stress-induced psychosis.   Now, I know to you hallucinating and thought process challenges are no big deal and can just be overcome simply by throwing a few psychotropic medications at the child or deep breathing.  However, we have not found this to be the case.  I guess if Rye were blind, deaf, mute or paralyzed you would see that he does indeed have a disability and needs more assistance than you are willing to provide, as those are the only kids who now qualify for significant support in our school system.   Since this is not our situation, however, I can guarantee you our son will be missing many more days of school to come so perhaps you should just go ahead and sign us up for truancy court for surpassing the legal limit of 10 days of absence.

Thank you and we look forward to explaining our child’s illness and absences to a court judge.  Perhaps he or she will have spent some time in a more forward thinking and humane country, will not reside in the middle ages and will have a grain of sense regarding the impact of mental illness.  If not, I guess we will go to jail for caring about our son and not wanting him to live in Wonderland/Nightmare On Elm Street just to get a “Free Appropriate Public Education” that we pay for with our tax money.

Sincerely,

Meg

The perception of reality is something that people without mental illness take for granted.   Myself included.  For Rye however, in times of unbalance,  it can be a precarious perception.  For days now, maybe weeks even, he has been agitated and in and out of reality.  Yesterday, in response to a period of intense aggravation, his doctors started him on Seroquel.  And whereas before when we tried this med it was too much and too sedating, this time it seems to have worked wonders.  Today he was back to earth.  And this morning was back to his perky self.   Completely grounded in reality.   Or at least so it appeared.

It was really incredible. 

I so hope it lasts. 

“Abilify,” I say “that’s the medicine you took to stop hearing things after the Adderall reaction.”

“Oh,” Rye says.  “That’s what I thought.  So, why are they advertising it for depression?”

“Well, they are saying it makes a good add-on for an antidepressant and also in low doses it is considered to be more of an anitdepressant than an antipsychotic.”

“Well, that’s weird,” he says “I don’t understand how they can advertise it to help depression when the medicine makes you think about killing yourself.”

“What?” I say.

“Yea, that medicine makes you think about killing yourself.”

“What?  I thought it helped you,” I say.  “You thought about killing yourself on it?  I never knew that.  Why didn’t you tell me that?  You only said you didn’t want to take it anymore because it made you feel weird.”

“Well, mom,” he says, “that is weird.  Don’t you think?  It’s weird to think about wanting to kill yourself.  That’s why I didn’t like that medicine”

And with that, although Abilify did stop the hallucinations, it is gone as an option in this house.

So, why do I post this?  Well, it’s not to be alarmist.  And it’s not to be anti-medication.  It is to show myself and others how we aren’t ever 100% sure what is going on with our children.  And that our children themselves aren’t always sure how to communicate their feelings or experiences or thoughts to us, no matter how close we are with them.  And this is important to know.

And this is a great concern of mine with medicating children, my own included.  Children, due to their sheer age and level of brain development, don’t always know how to identify what is happening within them and then in turn can’t always effectively communicate about what is going on, even at 12 years old.  If they are really young they are too developmentally immature to know what they should feel or should not feel or what is real and what isn’t simply because of their age.  And the only thing adults have to go on is their behavior.  With Rye, his behavior was actually a lot better on Abilify.  He was less moody, more cooperative, and more even overall.  I had no idea, however, he was having suicidal thoughts.  He later told me that one of the reasons he took the med even when he didn’t want to [keep in mind, he only took it for about 2 months] was because the adults in his life, myself included,  kept telling him how well he was doing on it and he wanted to make us happy.  He did this in spite of having to fight off feelings of wanting to kill himself.  Just to please others, including me.  Thank God nothing terrible happened as a result.  Thank God he started to get the ‘neck roll’ from the med so we stopped it only after about 2 months.  Someone was watching over us, no doubt.

With that I’ve provided the link to the U.S. Full Prescribing Information for Abilify, which does warn that Abilify can induce suicidal thoughts, as well as some links to website providing other people’s experiences with the drug.

http://www.abilify.com/pdf/pi.aspx

http://www.askapatient.com/viewrating.asp?drug=21436&name=ABILIFY

http://www.furiousseasons.com/archives/2008/11/abilify_for_depression_ad_now_airing_on_tv.html

Please always read the full U.S. Prescribing Information provided by the FDA for all medicines you give your child, including all possible side effects and all black box warnings.  Please never think this could never happen to my child.

Because it can.