My name is Kaley and I have Bipolar.  I am very new to my diagnosis as I was only diagnosed three months ago.  I feel that I have made incredible strides since then, but I recognize that Bipolar is a lifelong condition and I still have a long way to go.

The first sign that something wasn’t quite right in my life happened back in 1998 when I was a freshman in college.  I developed an eating disorder, anorexia, as a means to control my life.  I was going through a very rough transition from an overly strict household and attending a small Catholic school to a university with over 30,000 students.

I recovered from that to find myself in the job market a few years later.  I was working as a Business Banker, a very stressful job.  I couldn’t say no to anyone.  I kept taking on more and more responsibility in an effort to please everyone.  I was an exceptional employee.  From what I understand about Bipolar, I was probably hypomanic most of the time.  It was no wonder I excelled.

Stress kept piling on, and through a series of events, my brother came to live with my husband and I.  This put a terrible strain on our relationship.  About this time I began to drink more often to quiet my thoughts.  It seemed that alcohol was the only thing that would stop my mind from racing.  It became so destructive that I soon was drinking on my lunch breaks.  I worked in a high-rise bank building downtown, so geography was not an issue.

I knew I needed help with my anxiety, so I sought the help of a psychiatrist.  He diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and prescribed me Xanax and Effexor.  This did very little for me.  I think if anything, the Effexor made my mania worse.  I continued to drink at after-hours work functions and happy hours with work friends.

Everything came to a head in December of 2008 when I was arrested for a DUI.  This was a complete shock to me as I had never even received a parking ticket.  A week later I was fired from my job because of it.  I felt so depressed that my self-medicating ways did not stop, so three weeks later, I apparently did not learn my lesson and got a second DUI.

I entered counseling and continued with the psychiatrist, trying every combination of anti-anxiety drug known to man.  Nothing worked.  A year went on and I felt sorry for myself and did nothing to change my situation.  I became a sloth.  The driven and successful me became lost and replaced with a stranger.  In addition, my relationship with my husband was becoming more strained by the day.  I was not the person he married.

Finally in April 2010 I’d had enough.  I checked myself into outpatient group therapy at a mental health hospital.  There I learned coping skills and how to keep a journal, which has since morphed into a daily blog.  I learned how to be me again, and that just because I’ve made mistakes, my life isn’t over.  I can use this experience for good.  Today I totally abstain from alcohol as it has caused my nothing but problems and heartache.  My social activities do not revolve around it, and when I am at parties, I drink Diet Coke.  My friends understand and respect me all the more for it.

When I finished the program, I found a new doctor, who immediately diagnosed me with Bipolar.  This came as quite a shock.  Here I was doing all of this work and therapy related to anxiety, when in fact I was Bipolar.  I felt that I was back to the beginning.  But I wasn’t.  I can use all of the coping mechanisms and skills nonetheless.

I have Bipolar I, with racing thoughts.  I mainly live in the hypomanic range.  Since my depression over the loss of my job and DUI ended, the only times I have felt depressed was when I was on too high of a dose of my Bipolar medication (Geodon).  My doctor and I are working together to find a dose that is right for me.  She wants to keep me out of hypomania, but also wants to make sure I do not become too low.

My life has become easier since the diagnosis.  I now understand why I was self-medicating.  I understand why I do the things I do.  I am learning my triggers and how to calm my mind.  I have a lot of hope that I can live as normalized of a life as possible.  My family and friends are behind me, and I’ve built a very strong support system.  I believe I have all of the tools I need in life for me to be successful.

_______________

For more on Kaley, check out her blog at  www.anxiouskaley.com

So, it dawned on me yesterday when re-reading my post that perhaps I should elaborate on what I mean when I say that Rye is stable.

After all, what is ’stability’?

I’ll be honest,  I don’t know.  I mean, what is stability to others?  I don’t know.  We are learning as we go over here and all I can do is tell you what it looks like for us.

So, what it means for us is…Rye is not controlled and consumed by emotion.  His thought processes and perceptions are reasonable and he is functioning at a somewhat normal speed.  He is malleable, teachable, and capable of redirection.  He is more like a neurotypical kid.

Now…does he still get mad?

Yes.

Does he sometimes get really mad?

Yes.

Does he still get sad?

Yes.

Does he still cry sometimes?

Yes.

Does he still get frustrated?

Yes.

Is he happy all of the time?

No.

Is he happy a good deal of the time?

Yes.

Does he rage out of control with unstoppable destruction?

No.

Does he sometimes get overly happy and laugh that ‘over the top’ maniacal laugh?

Yes.

Does he engage in reckless and dangerous behavior with no thoughts of the consequences?

No.

Does he still need discipline?

Yes.

Does he still need structure?

Yes.

Does he always make the right choices?

No.

Does he need a lot of excerise?

Yes.

Does he care about others?

Yes.

Does he show empathy towards others?

Yes.

Can we tell him ‘no’ without him falling apart?

Yes.

Does he still have problems with transitions?

Yes.

Is he able to attend school?

Yes.

Is school still a struggle?

Yes.

Is he able to play group sports?

Yes.

Does he still have some anxiety?

Yes.

Is it crippling anxiety?

No.

Does he still need a lot of sleep?

Yes.

Is he able to sleep without issue for at least 8 hours a night?

Yes.

And that’s it in a nutshell.  As Rye is extremely sensitive to medication, we struggle with him being hypomanic or overmedicating him.  It’s a very fine line because he reacts so strongly to the smallest doses of meds. So for now, we choose to have him hypomanic as long as he does not hurt himself or others.

But it’s always in flux.

What does stability look like for your family?

So, in light of these situations, many parents are faced with the problem of how to manage their own child. How do you stop the dangerous behavior and help them to do the right thing? And often times, in times of desperation, the decision goes to whether or not to call the police on your own child. The thought is, maybe the police will scare them straight. Maybe dealing with the legal system and court system will make the child realize their actions have consequences and that this behavior is to be taken seriously. Maybe some time in a juvenile detention center or with a probation officer will be just what the child needs to make better decisions.

But does this work?

It is my personal opinion that, no, it does not work. And not only does it not work, it can have the opposite effect of what you thought it would do. You have now made your child into a criminal.

You have criminalized you own own child.

Now, I’m sure there are a lot of people that would disagree with me on this. And if you have a story that shows otherwise I would love to hear it. However, in my first marriage I was married to what the court systems consider as an adult to be a career criminal. He was raised in an incredibly dysfunctional and antisocial (i.e. engaging in behavior that goes against the norms of society) family and had a heavy drug problem starting at the age of about 13.  By 14 he was engaged in antisocial behavior that had him in and out of the court system, juvenile detention centers, boys camps, etc. for all of his teen years. By 18 he was in a prison diversion program that he stayed in until about 22 years old. And the story goes on and on through adulthood.

Did his involvement with the law as a teen scare him straight? No.

He used to tell me, the only thing going to juvenile detention centers or boys camps or whatever does for a teen boy is normalize antisocial behavior for them and make that the world they know. Not only does it not scare them straight, it desensitizes them to criminal or drug behavior and that becomes their new norm. And once your child has a probation office or is involved in the system, what are the chances that families whose kids are doing the right thing and have never had any contact with the court systems are going to want your child at their house? Or have their kids be friends with your kid? Pretty low. It would be the exception. So as a kid your are now steered even more to the wrong kids because those are the kids and the kids families that will accept those situations.

Now I’m not saying this is always the case. And I’m not saying the if your child is doing something horrible or endangering him or herself or your family to a grave degree that you should not protect yourself or your other children. Of course you should. But what I am saying is that one should think twice about the long term effects of calling the police on your child. Or having the child involved in the court system. And think about what that does to the child’s self esteem and self image. The child now sees him or herself as a criminal and knows that you also see them as a criminal.  That is hard to overcome.  Especially for kids already struggling with bipolar.  It’s now just one more thing for them to deal with and overcome.

Does this experience and self image help create a healthy adult?

It’s something to consider.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. ~ Jesus Christ

It’s interesting, though.  He is very much a behavior based therapist.  In other words,  he minimizes the effect of medicines as he believes they don’t control you.  You control yourself, regardless of medication.  Now, as much as I would like to believe this is wholly and completely true, I know it’s not.  We have learned the hard way that it’s not.   And I’m not sure the therapist completely believes it either as I know he know a great deal about bipolar disorder.  Rye is actaully able to make much better decisions and control himself better now with the medication.  Even he says he can feel it and can feel that he has better control of himself  and we can very, very much see it.  So while I think it’s a good idea for Rye to know that he controls himself and that this premise is what makes the actual behavior therapy work, the medication is what makes the therapy doable and we all know that.  Even Rye.

Anyway, so what have we learned so far?

Well, one of the best things from the first session was Practice Makes Perfect.   As he explained it, if Rye starts making good decisions now and practices working on making good decisions as he grows until he is 18 by the time he is an adult  he will be very good at making good decisions.  Making good decisions will be what he does well at the time of adulthood.  Conversely, if he starts now at 12 years old making bad decisions and practices making bad decisions over and over again from now until he is 18 years old, and surrounds himself with others that make bad decisions so the behavior becomes normalized, by the time he is an adult he will be an expert at making bad decisions.  And this will set him up for a very difficult adult life because the one thing he will be an expert at by the time he is 18 is making bad decisions.

I love this concept as it really is so true but I had never really thought of it in that way.

In the second session, today, he worked on reinforcing the concept of making good choices.  We also implemented a system of earning rewards and privileges (verses losing privileges or punishment which is where we were before).    We examined Rye’s behavior over the past week and looked at what he could have done differently and what Don and I as parents could have done differently (because let’s face it, we are learning here too).  We also talked about the fact that if the public school Rye goes to continues to be a total disaster in the fall (he wants to go back to school with his friends) then we should look at private school options.   In fact, he suggested a school that he said is great and so we are going to look at it in a few weeks.  We talked about football and sports, as Rye is really excited about that, and making good goals for yourself.  Keeping commitments.  Showing good character.   These are all things that Don and I talk about with Rye as well but it’s amazing how having an independent third party reinforcing the child and holding them responsible can have such an impact.

And the best thing about the therapist, the piece I just love and that makes Rye want to go and also leave the sessions feeling all warm and cozy, is that although the therapist is pretty hard on behavior and complying to rules and holding Rye accountable for what he does and says, he is also extremely good at positive visualization and enabling Rye to see what a great person he is now and can be in the future, what goals he can accomplish, what heights he can reach and how successful and wonderful he will be in the future as an adult.  It is really great.   He has Rye envision himself relaxing and following the rules and accomplishing whatever goals he wants for himself and having a very successful life.

I love it.

Accountability, following rules, responsibility, caring, empathy, hard work, respect for others, respect for one’s self, and good character, all coming together to create subsequent limitless success in life.

The possibilities in life are limitless if you do the right thing.

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.

I’ve been reading a lot of articles lately of recent accounts of children dying from taking pharmaceutical psychiatric drugs.  In one case the child’s body system shut down due to overdose, in another the child had a heart attack, and in another the child hung himself.

And all I can think is, if you give your child pharmaceutical drugs (which I have done and will most likely do again – although my child is older now and the risks of use are less than with younger children) and the child dies as a result of taking said medications [be it by organ failure, suicide, allergic reaction, whatever], who is responsible for the death?  Is it the parent responsible?  Is it the doctor that prescribed the medicine responsible?  How is this decided?

And does it matter who is responsible?  Or is it a mute point once the child is dead?

What if one parent wants to medicate the child and the other doesn’t?  Whose opinion wins and makes that final decision and if the final decision is to medicate how does the other parent feel?

And, what if the medicines given to the child are prescribed under the category of ‘off-label’, meaning they are not approved by the FDA for children as young as are receiving them because those meds have never been tested on that population and no one knows the long term results of the medicine on young, developing brains?  Then who is responsible if something goes wrong?  The doctor that prescribes the meds for off-label use or the parents that accept and utilize the meds for off-label purposes?

I know with Rye we have tried quite a few meds.  We have not had great luck so far and have actually had some very scary results from some of them.  To the point that right now the only ones I think I’d even be willing to try again are Depakote or Lithium.

But I always wonder…how do you know when the potential benefits of using psychiatric medications outweigh the risks?

I can’t tell you how many stories I have heard of parents using anti-psychotics to calm a child down or reduce mania only to find that after years of using the anti-psychotic for the one reason, when they then try to take the child off the med for whatever reason the child now actually has a permanent thought process disorder or permanent psychosis.   That is freaking scary.   And these are kids who never had hallucinations or delusions prior to taking medication, they were just hyper or appeared to be manic.  And now they have a thought disorder.  Or permanent tics.  That happens as well.  Or man boobs.  That can only be corrected with surgery.  That happens as well.

And what about polypharmacology?  On children.   That’s a whole can of worms in and of itself that I honestly believe no one fully understands, especially when you take into account how different each individual’s body chemistry is.

I know for us personally we have used Adderall two different times in Rye’s life (yes, we were stupid enough to do it again after one really bad reaction) and both times the Adderall caused mania and psychosis.  The first time at 6 years old, when the Adderall was combined with Risperdal, it also caused a Grand Mal seizure.  The second time this manic/psychotic reaction to Adderall happened, at age 12, it took us months to get him out of the psychosis.  It was really scary.   And had I not been very cynical of the meds and always questioning our psychiatrist (which don’t you know he just loves – thank god the man is very expereinced, patient and flexible), we probably would have thought Rye needed to be on anti-psychotics forever, which he does not.  The psychosis did go away.  Both times.

I’ll tell you, I don’t have any answers but I do know that it’s all scary.  I would never forgive myself if my child died from taking a psychiatric medicine I gave him.  That said, I know I also have to be careful that he doesn’t die from the symptoms of his illness either, which makes it a delicate balancing act.

It’s tough.  These are tough decisions to make, there’s no doubt about it.  And I can see why parents choose all different routes.   Medicating is stressful.  Not medicating is stressful.

None of it is easy.

I was watching “19 Kids and Counting” tonight and Michelle Duggar said this about her kids and homeschooling, the world is a classroom.   I thought it was great.   Because it’s so true.  And I wonder, is “out-of-school schooling” better for some kids that “in-school schooling”?  Could be.  And I may have one of those kids.

Now, on a slightly unrelated note, I have a not-so-secret desire to be a Duggar.  So my opinion on all of this is biased.  I just love them.  Their kids are so calm and pleasant and mature and responsible and courteous, etc. etc. etc.  I find it just really amazing.  And wonderful to see.  Granted, their kids don’t seem to have any neurological struggles as mine does.  Nonetheless, they inspire me.  And I wonder if they would all still be that way if they had to go to public school for 8 hours a day.  But alas, we’ll never know.

Anyway, Rye is out of school this week.  He told me today he does not want to go back to regular school.  He wants to homeschool.  He says there is too much drama and chaos at the school and life is much calmer not going.  And he doesn’t mind doing schoolwork.  He just can’t take the atmosphere there.   I guess it was fun for a while and then it all got to be too much.  Way too much.  And with everything that has happened in the past few months that makes perfect sense.  So, now I wait until the IEP meeting on Monday and see what we can come up with.  I suggested to Rye maybe a happy medium would be a half day at school but he’s luke warm on that idea right now.  I guess we’ll just see.  I have to work part time so we’ll have to do something.  I am intrigued though to think about all of the things he could learn if he wasn’t in a classroom all day.  Especially since now he has no art, music or related art classes (foreign language, careers, computers)  at school.  The possibilities are endless.

Anyway, it is my experience that a lot of special needs kids homeschool so the parents can create the atmosphere the kids need to be happy and successful.  And focus on the child’s strengths vs their weaknesses.  We’ve actually done it before and it worked really well.  Rye was a much calmer, more mature, less frantic kid.  I  guess we’ll just see what the future brings.

These posts are not written for compensation as I make no money from this site [note: I am an affiliate of Barnes & Noble through Google Affiliates so if by chance you buy a book from a link on this site I do make a percentage of that purchase price.  It has yet to happen so to date I have made no money.  I do enjoy Barnes & Noble though and I love books so I like to encourage both].   The guest posts are voluntary and are done simply out of the kindness of the poster’s heart to help me and other parents of bipolar children/teens understand the disorder.    They are paying it forward, if you will.  I am extremely grateful to all participants who take the time to help with this project.

If you are bipolar or have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and would like to help with this project of understanding, please email me at meg@raisingbipolar.com.

Thank you and God bless you.

Meg

By examining the results of two large national surveys, MU researchers found an “age gradient” in the prevalence of bipolar disorder, with part of the population appearing to outgrow the disorder. In the survey results, 5.5 to 6.2 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 suffer from bipolar disorder, but only about 3 percent of people older than 29 suffer from bipolar disorder.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090929141530.htm

I guess when I read this it says to me there is a question with the initial diagnosis being correct or not versus did they really outgrow it.  However, the study suggests that the change in symptoms and diagnosis has more to do with the age at which one reaches full physiological brain development.

Researchers predict the prevalence of the disorder also could be affected by brain development, particularly the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex, the very front part of the brain, is thought to control perception, senses, personality and intelligence. In particular, it controls reactions to social situations, which can be a challenge for people with bipolar disorder.

“The maturing of the prefrontal cortex of the brain around 25 years of age could biologically explain the developmentally limited aspect of bipolar disorder,” Cicero said.

Interesting.

Makes you wonder if children diagnosed as bipolar could outgrow it as well then when their brain reaches full development.

I also wonder about the effect of hormones during the teen and young adult years and can’t help but think that has a significant impact as well.   I know I personally was much more emotional and volatile as a teen and young adult (as I think most people are) and I am not bipolar.  For me it was related to maturity (ie brain development), hormones, and life experience and reference points as far as what acquired problem solving skills or lack thereof I had at the time.

Anyway, something to keep in mind.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/trials/index.shtml

I personally have mixed feeling about these trials and would not involve my child in any that involved medication but I do think participating in these studies can be a good way to get tests and services that one might not be able to afford or have access to otherwise so I thought I’d post the link.   And many of the studies only involve cognitive testing, therapy or behavioral observation/retraining.

Anyway, there are studies going on all across the country for all different issues.  My friend has a son with Fragile X Syndrome and they have participated in a lot of studies that get him some really great services and tests that they never would be able to afford otherwise so it has worked really well for her family.

If anyone has ever participated in any of these studies, please let me know how it went.