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Learning & Development > Bipolar
Disorder in children
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Bipolar
disorder is one of the more common disorder
observed among children. As a parent,
you need to be able to identify this disorder
and take the right set of corrective actions
to put the life of your child back in
track in the unfortunate case that s/he
is currently undergoing this disorder.
Before anything
else, you need to understand that bipolar
disorder is a phenomenon in children that
can be taken care of. You need to keep
a cool head and make sure that you never
panic. You have to face the child and
help the child get over the problem.
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Take heart - your
child is not the only one who has suffered from
such unfortunate symptoms and these cases usually
come to a positive end with the right approach.
What causes a
bipolar disorder? Bipolar disorder is not about
the child's mentality or attitude - it comes
from inside the brain. If the neuro-transmitters
of the brain are affected in the child, the
consequence is often a bipolar disorder. When
these neuro-transmitters don't work properly,
the child would experience and demonstrate alternative
mood swings between the two extremes - the manic
mood and the depressive mood. And this swing
is what we perceive to be the bipolar disorder
as a whole.
In the manic mood,
the child will be almost impossible to deal
with. S/he will show anger, rage and violence.
It might go a notch worse and the child might
have sessions of destruction. In such sessions,
one of the most common activities exhibited
by the child is to throw objects away and destroy
them. Children might tend to be attracted to
more fragile objects while throwing and destroying
things. After a session of manic
behavior, the child will suddenly calm down.
While you might be tempted to think that the
session of craziness is over, in reality another
session would begin at this time. The child
would now go deep down into a low mood, and
experience depression. In this phase, the child
will feel down in dumps, and feel a shadow of
darkness looming deep inside. This will continue
for a longer period. Then, after an arbitrary
period of time, the child will go back to the
manic mood and the whole cycle would repeat.
This entire cycle is how the victim of bipolar
disorder would experience the trauma.
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There are
some relatively milder forms of such bipolar
disorder observed in children. Attention
Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD)
is one of them and another prominent one
is Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). The
first one of the two qualifies more in
the bipolar disorder category compared
to the second one. Usually the symptoms
for a child with such disorders are signs
of a gradual or even sudden decline in
academia, losing personal belongings all
over, loss of concentration, trouble in
learning newer things compared to earlier,
being upset over tiny things and over-anxiety
in trying new things or minor changes
in routine and life.
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Research has proved
that the stereotype of labeling children as
dreamy or naughty often causes the parents,
teachers and medical/health professionals to
misdiagnose children with depression, ADD or
ADHD. In fact, the major difficulties the child
is facing are completely missed at times. The
fact that a child is having problem in learning
or is not being able to make healthy relationships
in peer groups is often ignored as the child's
tendency of forgetting or being alone, rather
than diagnosing it. A child tends to get the
deserved caring attention only when aggression
and disruption becomes a significant part of
his/her behavior. That is when the child gets
treated, which is rather unfortunate. As a parent,
you need to be on the cautious side. It is normally
seen that the more extreme forms of the bipolar
disorder are not overlooked since they are too
blatantly obvious. However, as a parent, it
is always advisable to stay alert.
Once the bipolar
disorder is diagnosed, the child will undergo
medication. Counseling also helps in improving
the condition of the child. There is a popular
myth that the child would start losing the sense
of who they are and how their parents look at
them and love them. This is purely a myth and
far from reality. Unless the child is over-medicated,
such a loss of sense would not occur. The medication
does have a knocking effect on the child for
sometime, but it does not persist in the longer
run. Of course, even the temporary lag does
concern the parents and even the doctor, and
they would certainly raise the question whether
achieving complete cure through alternative
treatment is possible. In many cases, the child
can actually be cured through alternative treatment
and is better off without medication.
Cognitive behavioral
therapy is arguably the best non-medical
treatment among children with bipolar disorder.
This therapy centers upon the child's education
on bipolar systems and capability to recognize
such systems. The child would be further taught
to understand the factors that trigger such
behavior and what kind of behavior each of such
factors trigger. The parent must also be given
this education along with the child so that
the parent does not make the child face such
issues from undesired angels. Thus, the core
of cognitive behavior therapy for bipolar disorder
is to allow the affected child as well as the
parents to ascertain for themselves the factors
that they can do to stay away from manic and
depressive occurrences. In fact, cognitive behavior
therapy has been tried in parallel to medical
therapy by researchers and such efforts have
proved to be successful.
Another effective
therapy that works particularly well for children
is play therapy. This goes really well with
smaller children. In such therapy, the child
is placed in certain "imaginary" situations
where they have to be in a good mood and emotionally
healthy condition. The child responds to this
and starts to put his/her mindset in the desired
position. As a result, the overall mental health
keeps improving. In bipolar children with a
high degree of problem, this may not always
work - if it does not work that would be reasonably
clear at the earliest phases of the therapy.
Visitors
who read this article also read:
-
Out
of Control Children
-
Aggressive
Child Behavior and Anger
-
Depression
in children
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