Thoughts on Growing Up Bipolar

There have been many responses to Newsweek's recent article, Growing Up Bipolar in many of the blogs I read over the last couple of weeks. I wasn't going to comment on this, as much of what I have to say on the subject has already been said extremely eloquently by thememoryartist.

However, I do have a few thoughts on the subject...and I'm not looking for a fight here, I'm just wondering out loud...as it were...

The subject of the article, a ten-year-old boy named Max, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the tender age of two, and has since been on 38 different meds. The thing that struck me the most about this article was the part where Max said, "I don't have any control."

How many children who are growing up on psych meds grow up with the idea that they are not able to control their emotions...and how damaging is that belief? It strikes me that it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I wonder how many of these children manage to achieve any sort of emotional development whatsoever, when the very emotions they need to learn to deal with are dulled and blunted by the medications. Part of growing up is learning how to deal with one's emotions in a reasonable, intelligent manner. But if you've never been allowed to have an authentic human emotional experience, how can you be expected to have any level of emotional maturity at all?

What happens when these children, some of whom have surely been wrongly diagnosed reach the age of majority and say, "Screw you and your pills, I'm done."

Once you stop the meds, your emotional life comes back full blast. I know I had a rough time coming off my bipolar meds, and I did it at the age of 40, and had been on them for less than two years. My ability to handle emotions was already developed and in place.

I wonder how damaged these poor kids are going to be when they finally see the world without psychotropic blinders...and how much therapy they are going to need in order to live comfortably with their newfound humanity. Certainly their lives are going to become far more complex once those layers of emotional experience are added back in. And the skills needed to deal with those emotions won't be there because they've never been needed--the medication has done all the controlling.

And don't even get me started on the brain damage aspect. These medications can cause detrimental changes in a fully developed adult brain...how much damage can they do to a young, developing brain?

Nobody knows.

But I imagine we're going to find out as the current generation of "bipolar" children reaches the age where medical decisions such as whether or not to continue taking these medications become theirs and theirs alone.