I am reposting this for anyone who wasn’t able to view it during the week, as I think making this information known is so important. A new post is on the way, but please read this in the meantime, if you haven’t already.
When I wrote the proposal for my M.A. Thesis in 2008, on the new phenomenon of “Bipolar Disorder” being diagnosed in children, it had not yet been designated a specific label or been claimed by the American Psychiatric Association. Thus, I referred to it as “Early-Onset Bipolar Disorder”, as self-help literature on the topic such as Papolos and Papolos’ The Bipolar Child (the authors respectively being a psychiatrist and his wife, who has no credentials but seems to really enjoy public speaking – i.e. hearing her own voice) did. I did receive funding from the Conservative Canadian Government to complete the project, which will occupy my time this coming summer, a hopeful and unexpected surprise 
The current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM-IV-TR) does not include a “bipolar” condition diagnosable in children, although it does include the childhood disorders of “Conduct Disorder” (children misbehaving? *gasp!*), “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” (basically an unwillingness to co-operate with authority figures – a pain in the ass for teachers and parents), and of course the many varieties of AD(H)D. The release of the DSM-V has been delayed many times, most recently from 2012 to 2013. There is no doubt that “Pediatric Bipolar Disorder”, a term now used by the media, family doctors, and pharmaceutical companies, will be included in the new edition.
The precise symptoms of “Pediatric Bipolar Disorder” are still being hammered out, and I wonder if this has something to do with the latest delay. However, they include “manic” and “depressive” behaviours as follow:
“Mania” in children: grandiose thoughts or the belief that one has “special powers” (doesn’t every small child imagine that they are Superman or some other favourite cartoon character at some point?), difficulty falling asleep, temper tantrums (yes, the “terrible twos” can now be resolved with a pill…), impulsive behaviour, excessive energy (do you mean some children still play outside instead of sitting in front of the television set for six hours a day? well, this is a disorder.), and “hypersexuality”. Here I could go on a long rant about how I think it is natural and healthy for young children to explore and be aware of their sexuality, but I’ll save it for the Thesis.
“Depression” in children: “depressed mood” (for some reason, psy-experts have the right to define terms using said terms in that definition, while no one else, not even Webster or the Oxford Press do), difficulty getting up in the morning (does any child want to get up at 7 am to go to school?!? I certainly didn’t.), and episodes of crying and “irrational sadness” (how can an outside observer determine the rationality of a child’s sadness? It is a pretty sad world to grow up in.).
If a child has Pediatric Bipolar Disorder, the duration of these periods of mania and depression do not occur for prolonged, mutually exclusive periods as they do in “Bipolar Adults”. The definition of manic-depression/bipolar disorder has been based upon mania/depression that lasts for longer than a week has been the most crucial factor in its diagnosis since the ancient Greeks wrote of mania vs. melancholia, and into the Age of Enlightenment when the condition was renamed “Cyclical Insanity”. Children are exempt from this, and ain’t that great, as the “mood” of any child constantly fluctuates due to minor upsets or excitement.
The most disturbing aspect of this new diagnosis is medication. In Canada alone (population 30 million) 2 million “off-label” prescriptions for antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepenes, and neuroleptics were written for children in 2006. “Off-label” means that a prescription is handed out despite the lack of any clinical research regarding that drug’s effect on a certain cohort of the population – in this case children from ages two to seventeen – or regarding its usefulness in treating a certain condition (ex/ many women are prescribed antidepressants for chronic pain, although the benefit of taking an antidepressant for chronic pain has never been established. This is another horrible phenomenon, as it leads to physiological conditions being undiagnosed for years, as women are convinced that their pain is “all in their head”).
It is well known that many preteens and teenagers have committed suicide or homicide shortly after being placed on SSRI antidepressants. The response by the pharmaceutical companies was to put “black box warnings” on these drugs, mentioning the risk of increased suicidal ideation/homicidal ideation. Yet it hasn’t stopped the doctors from handing them out like candy. I remember when I was 19, and was just starting to have my own feelings and emotions medicalized and psychiatrized, my 15 year-old girlfriend was given a prescription for Paxil (the number one drug on the list that initiated suicides) at a walk-in clinic when she complained that she was having trouble concentrating on her homework. That reminds me, the inability to concentrate is also a symptom of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder – one that appears both on the sides of mania and depression. It is now being claimed that many cases of AD(H)D are actually cases of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder, or, that the two disorders are often co-current.
What effects are these drugs going to have on the developing brain of a two year-old? Never mind the children that have already died as a result of overmedication, from heart-attacks, strokes, and seizures. The PBS documentary series Frontlinediscusses one such case in their excellent piece “The Medicated Child”, which can be viewed in full here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/medicatedchild/view/
Child psychiatry, popularized by Freud and studied by famous psychologists such as Ericsson and Piaget, established in the early 1900s that children do not develop critical thinking skills until the age of seven. Thus, when their parents feed them psychopharmaceuticals they would never question why, just as my generation never questioned why Mom fed us Flinstones vitamins. When they begin to feel the (side-)effects of the powerful psychotropics they are ingesting, they do not possess the ability to relate these feelings to the pills they swallow with their morning cup ofSunny-D. I cannot imagine how scary this would have been for me at age 4, 5, or 6. Children have no power to choose here, and I call this child abuse.
Whereas Frontline’s thorough, critical documentary was first aired in 2007, HBO has recently aired their new documentary on five families with bipolar kids, Diagnosis: Bipolar. Alaryyk wrote a review of the documentary on this blog as we watched it for the second time. The families that participated in the documentary were working-class (both parents had to work full-time jobs to earn the money needed to raise children), and at least two others (excuse my far from perfect memory) were single-parent families. Thus, they did not have very much time to spend with their children – to play with them, talk with them about their feelings, and ask them questions about what was bothering them when they became “sad” or threw a “temper tantrum”.
As the North American economy falls further into recession, it is certainly not the fault of parents for having to work extra hours. However, taking their child to a family doctor or child psychiatrist to fetch a pill that will relieve them of the frustration their child is causing them is a choice, and almost always a completely uninformed one. As doctors spend less and less time with individual patients due to medical systems that are falling apart – in Canada and Western Europe just as much as in the United States – they quickly hand out more and more prescriptions to relieve “symptoms” without telling patients about their potential side-effects, and if parents don’t have time to spend talking to their children, it is doubtful that they have the time to research the drugs they dole out to their children.
One medical doctor interviewed in the documentary states that, “it would be criminal not to medicate these children.” It is my strong, well-researched opinion that medicating “these” children is criminal.
There are so many negative factors associated with the creation (medical/psy-experts would substitute the word “creation” with “discovery”, despite the fact that children have been exhibiting these same behaviours, um, since the beginning of time?) of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder that they cannot all be summarized in one article. One of these is the contribution it will make to the already existing “epidemic” of childhood obesity. Antipsychotics drastically increase blood lipids, and almost all of the children interviewed in Diagnosis: Bipolar, who have been taking an antipsychotic for some time, are morbidly obese, not to mention the speech impediments they have developed, which I’m sure don’t help their troubles with being bullied at recess time. The average diagnosed child is on at least threemedications.
Atypical antipsychotics have been clinically proven to cause Type-II Diabetes. Although pharmaceutical companies released this information to the media in Japan – that Seroquel, Olanzapene (Zyprexa), and Risperidone (Risperdal) have this causal effect – American pharmaceutical companies have declined to comment on this revelation.
Children are the ideal market for pharmaceutical companies that have failed to come up with any new drugs to treat “mental illness” for over a decade, although they are creating new pills such as “Seroxat”, which is simply a combination of Prozac and Olanzapine in a single pill, and many atypical antipsychotics and SSRI/SNRI antidepressants that are isomers – manipulated molecules that have the exact same qualities – of old ones. The inclusion of children in their target population is evilly ingenious, as children have more disposable income than any other sector of the population (by proxy of their parents).
I mentioned that as a child a school counsellor asked me to look at a poster of various “happy faces/sad faces/angry faces” and identify the emotion being displayed in a previous post. Thus, when I learned the other day that children are now being shown those very same faces while having their brains scanned in an fMRI chamber to diagnose Pediatric Bipolar Disorder, I was very disturbed. Children whose brains show more activity in the amagdyla, the brain structure responsible for emotion, when shown sorrowful faces, are being diagnosed with the disorder based on this factor alone.
The argument is made that children should be put on medication as early as possible, to alter their brain development such that they won’t experience “Bipolar Disorder” in adulthood, emphasizing the detrimental effect this will have on their ability to reach educational and career goals, i.e. to be productive. There is absolutely no empirical, clinical evidence to support this wild claim. Pediatric Bipolar Disorder is now even being diagnosed before a child is born – if a fetus kicks more than “normal” while in the womb, there is a good chance they may have the condition.
“Pediatric Bipolar Disorder” is the product of late-neoliberalism, the decay of the “nuclear family”, the pressure put on children to perform without the support of parents struggling to make ends meet, and pharmaceutical companies eager to make even more billions of dollars in the middle of a recession.
Its proliferation as a legitimate category of “disease” must stop. Off-label prescriptions must stop. Parents must inform themselves before running to the doctor’s office, as the would if their child had an ear infection. If this does not happen, one can only imagine the consequences for society, when a generation of medicated children come of age.
