From what I have read, most bipolar children show symptoms during puberty. Amanda has what is called "early onset" bipolar. I think she had it as an infant. She'd be fine and then she'd scream miserably. She wouldn't eat. Back and forth to the doctor. The closest we got to a diagnosis then was colic. At one point, she was borderline failure to thrive. She was supposed to gain 1/2 ounce a day. 7 ounces in 14 days. In 14 days, she gained 6 1/2 ounces. Not enough to be considered healthy Not enough to start testing.

At 2, she was so miserable, I decided she was suffering from being left in the care of nannies. I took the next two years off of work. It was a disaster for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was that I wasn't cut out for not working.

In preschool at 4, she worsened. Many days, she went to school looking like a wild animal because she wouldn't let anyone brush her hair. She ran off frequently. She would freak out and fail to recognize me as her mother. After one day in kindergarten when we picked her up at school, and literally wrestled her screaming into the car, she began throwing things from the back seat. A shoe hit the accelerator causing a sudden jump ahead. We didn't get into an accident but I figured we needed more help. Off we went to our family physician, who heard the tale, announced it was ADD and insisted we try Ritalin.

I wasn't opposed to Ritalin but it seemed lke we ought to have more investigation than that. We switched doctors. We decided to got through various testing procedures.

The first step was testing for food allergies. We went on a diet that started with fruit, vegetables, rice and a few proteins. How a 5 year old manged to eat like that, I'll never know but she improved for a while. Then we started adding foods. Nitrates resulted in hysteria about 90 minutes after ingestion no matter what. Artificial sweeteners like aspartame also resulted in a mood swing. That was problematic in a preschool that believed sugar was bad and handed out sugarfree candy.

We controlled her food and bought ourselves a few months of peace. In first grade, however, disaster struck again. the class was on a split schedule. One group started at 8 and left at 2. The other group started at 9 and left at 3. Amanda was in the later group. She'd return from gym, half the class would leave and she'd fall apart, rolling and screaming on the floor and trying to run away.

Once again we did a massive effort at figuring out the problem. The principal and her teacher were very supportive. We pulled her out of gym and sent her to the office with a book for that hour. The rest enabled her to control herself and she could make it through the day. After two weeks though, the gym teacher complained. In addition to the need for exercise, gym was an important way to learn how to interact with her peers, according to the gym teacher. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed and the principal and her classroom teacher understood that any learning to fit in she got at gym was quickly undone by the sight of her curled into the fetal position at the classroom door afterwards.

A year later, she started having trouble again in the afterschool program. Again, her moods seemed to arise out of nowhere and be uncontrolable. Off to the doctor and this time, the EEG. She didn't pass and showed signs of temporal lobe seizures which could cause emotionally volatile episodes. I read all I could and learned of a theory that many violent criminals suffered from such seizures. Off to a neurologist. Anti-seizure medicine. Another few months of peace.

If, as we now know, she is bipolar, why did all of this work? No one knows for sure but by controlling her environment and controlling the chemicals in her system, we were able to reduce the environmental stresses enough that she could control her emotional instability. In fact, the anti-seizure medication she used is one of the group of medicines she needs for her bipolar. As she grew though, and her brain matured, the condition worsened and the controls we had would progressively fail.

It all came to a head when she was nine. That incident deserves it's own post.