Word: bipolarity
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With kids, things aren't nearly so clear. Most children with the condition are ultra-rapid cyclers, flitting back and forth among mood states several times a day. Papolos, who co-wrote The Bipolar Child, studied 300 bipolar kids ages 4 through 18, and he believes he has spotted a characteristic pattern. In the morning, bipolar children are more difficult to rouse than the average child. They resist getting up, getting dressed, heading to school. They are either irritable, with a tendency to snap and gripe, or sullen and withdrawn...
...midday, the darkness lifts, and bipolar children enjoy a few clear hours, enabling them to focus and take part in school. But by 3 or 4 p.m., Papolos warns, "the rocket thrusters go off," and the kids become wild, wired, euphoric in a giddy and strained way. They laugh too loudly when they find something funny and go on long after the joke is over. Their play has a flailing, aggressive quality to it. They may make up stories or insist they have superhuman abilities. They resist all efforts to settle them and throw tantrums if their needs are denied...
Preverbal toddlers and infants cannot manifest the disorder so clearly, and there is no agreement about whether they exhibit any symptoms at all. However, many parents of a bipolar say they noticed something off about their baby almost from birth, reporting that he or she was unusually fidgety or difficult to soothe. Broman insists she knew her son Kyle was bipolar even when he was in the womb. "This child never slept inside," she says. "He was active 24 hours...
...Broman, making that diagnosis may not have been hard since the condition, as Ketter puts it, "is hugely familial." Broman herself is bipolar, though her illness was not diagnosed until adulthood. Children with one bipolar parent have a 10% to 30% chance of developing the condition; a bipolar sibling means a 20% risk; if both parents are bipolar, the danger rises as high as 75%. About 90% of bipolars have at least one close relative with a mood disorder...
...does appear in a child, the diagnosis is often wrong. ADHD is the likeliest first call, if only because some of the manic symptoms fit. The treatment of choice for ADHD is Ritalin, a stimulant that has the paradoxical ability to calm overactive kids. But giving Ritalin to a bipolar child can deepen an existing cycle or trigger one anew. Brandon Kent, a 9-year-old from La Vernia, Texas, in whom ADHD was diagnosed in kindergarten (they did not yet know he was bipolar), took Ritalin and paid the price. "It sent him into depression," says his mother Debbie...