Parenting magazine has a great article about medicating children for mental illnesses including Early Onset Bipolar Disorder. There are interviews with parents who know what it is like to have a mentally ill child. Unfortunately, too many adults look unkindly at parents that medicate their children. They don't understand what it is like to have a child that does not respond to punishment, will not stop bad, sometimes violent behavior and cannot control their emotions.
"No one knows what it's like to have a child who bites through your skin when he doesn't get what he wants, who threatens to kill you — and then, a minute later, comes to you with tears running down his face, so remorseful, and says, 'Mommy, I want to go to sleep and never wake up.'"
Medicating your child is something that parents grieve over every day, even when they see results. Unfortunately, all too often medication is the option of last resort and is the only thing that works and qualified therapists are in short supply.
Even doctors who are critical of early diagnoses acknowledge that there are young kids who have very serious problems and whose families are frantic. The challenge is that medication is too often their only recourse: "The therapies that work for treating disruptive behavior disorders in kids aren't readily available," says Jon McClellan, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington and the lead author of the AACAP's report on childhood bipolar disorder. Such programs, typically found in universities or teaching hospitals, employ a one-on-one approach where parents are coached by therapists to respond in specific ways to their kids' specific behaviors, but there's a shortage of skilled therapists. So when parents say they've "tried everything," says Dr. McClellan, they probably haven't, but only because they're unable to get the help they need.
You can read the full article here: Placing Your Mentally Ill Child on Psychiatric Drugs
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