I am a social worker who treats children and teens. I am concerned that gifted, creative children, sometimes misfits in our regimented society, are being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, and threatened with a lifetime of dangerous medications and social stigma. Having that dire diagnosis imposed on you at age six severely comprises your ability to lead a normal life. What devastating effect must it have on a young child to be told he has a permanently broken brain.
Twenty years ago, psychiatry believed that bipolar disorder strikes in the late teens, that it was impossible to diagnose in children or early adolescents. Now psychiatrists occasionally diagnose bipolar disorder in four year olds, after too brief examination. Is diagnosing kids as bipolar an unthinking way to squelch kids who are divergent thinkers, who think too fast, talk too fast, get bored too easily in our increasing test-oriented schools?
Other countries are not undergoing the same childhood bipolar epidemic. Are children in the US more disturbed, or are US psychiatrists more in bed with Big Pharm? Too many of the early discoverers of bipolar disorder in children were funded by drug companies. Longitudinal studies have not been done, comparing the life trajectory of kids diagnosed and medicated to the history of kids whose parents refused medication after diagnosis. It is not clear that kids diagnosed with bipolar disorder grow into adults with the disease. Yet the paradigm of bipolar disorder describes a chronic disease needing lifetime treatment, only controlled, never cured.
Has the breakdown of the extended family and increasingly smaller, isolated families increased the number of kids in serious trouble? Why is there such a striking absence of social criticism about the so-called epidemic of bipolar children? I often go to psychiatric grand rounds on childhood mental illness. The children's family situation, divorced parents, siblings, schools, extended family are rarely analyzed.
For the last 30 years American society has conducted an unprecedented experiment in having babies and toddlers cared for by a rapid turnover of strangers--not parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends.
Babies as young as two months spend most of their waking hours in group care, which almost inevitably has to modify children's individual temperament and biological rhythms. Both mother and father work long exhausting hours without the support of nearby grandparents. Schools are obsessed with testing, neglecting the art, music, writing, play that nurture a child's creativity.
Since I was 40, I have struggled with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. I have personally ingested the medications now being inflicted on young kids. Even my strong intellect and excellent education could not prevail against the cognitive onslaught of depakote or risperdal. My IQ seemed to drop thirty points; I lost my lifelong writing ability as well as any motivation to write. Now Big Pharm runs advertisements on primetime TV and popular magazines to convince patients that atypical anti-psychotics are the magic bullets to make their lives wonderful. Anti-psychotics used to be reserved for chronic schizophrenics. Some of these druge cause enormous weight gain, sometimes leading to diabetes.
How many psychiatrist prescribing drugs for young children have taken them? American society has come to regard children as high-end luxury items parents insist on purchasing and then whine that society should take some responsibility. We have the least child friendly society in any Western country. Do we need more social change and fewer psychiatric drugs? Would a child-friendly society where parents could better balance work and family cut down the number of children taking multiple powerful psychiatric medications?