All this week the BBC has been highlighting issues affecting disabled people as part of a campaign called Access All Areas.
Among the topics covered have been technology, job rights and how stigmatised many disabled people can feel.
Hidden disabilities affect millions of peoples lives with on a daily basis, among them are bipolar disorder and autism.
The BBC’s Nick Higham reports.
Source: BBC
Now a devoted grandmother and mental-health advocate, Margaret Trudeau, 62, recounts her struggle with bipolar disorder in a hopeful new book called Changing My Mind. After decades of treatment, and with the help of family, “every day is wonderful for me,” she tells The Globe and Mail while driving through the Vermont mountains with her son Justin’s family and her daughter, Ally, for a Thanksgiving picnic. link to read full article
Source: Globe and Mail
Image credit:iStockphoto
They are some of the most troubled children that psychiatrists ever see. They have raging tempers and engage in reckless behaviors that frequently land them in the principal’s office, even the hospital. But are they bipolar?
In the last 15 years, diagnoses of bipolar disorder in children have skyrocketed as much as fortyfold, according to some estimates. The condition — defined by severe mood swings, between depression and mania, lasting for weeks or month at a time — has traditionally been considered a lifelong condition in adults and is treated through tranquilizers and antidepressants. link to continue reading
Source: LA Times
Children diagnosed with bipolar disorder may fare better with a different diagnosis, according to research published by Hastings Center scholars Erik Parens and Josephine Johnston in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health.
Parens and Johnston examine the evolution of the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children and its dramatic increase since the mid 1990s. They emphasize that there is vigorous debate about whether symptoms in children accurately reflect the criteria for bipolar disorder, particularly for mania. The researchers support an emerging approach that would give many of those children a new diagnosis called Severe Mood Dysregulation (SMD) or Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria (TDD).
Their findings, which were supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, come soon after proposed revisions to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) were opened to public comment. [continue reading…]
