Just as you are already falling in love with your child-to-be, dreaming dreams, and planning to protect your child from life's dangers, so too, I'm sure, did your parents. The only difference is that they probably didn't anticipate the possibility that you would have some kind of ill-defined illness with many names. Just as you will love, care for, and protect your child, so too did your parents. Your parents must have loved you very much (even though there may have been considerable friction between you), and they did the best they knew how with the best advice they were able to afford.

Parents of children with bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses are driven by worry, fear, and desperation to seek psychiatric care for their children. Parents can tell that their child is suffering even in the midst of their sometimes wild, destructive, or dangerous behavior. When the child is rejected by other kids, by neighbors, by church members, by teachers; when a child's behavior results in suspensions or expulsions from school, visits by CPS, or legal trouble; and/or when a child's behavior is dangerous to self or others, parents take desperate measures.

Parents agonize over the use of powerful medications. What will it do TO their child? Conversely, What will it do FOR their child? In the end, their goal in choosing to go the medication route is the fervent hope and prayer that the meds will calm the symptoms, keep their child alive, safe, out of jail, able to go to school.

Psychiatry is a bit of art and a bit of science. Some pdocs are better at diagnosing and treating than others, but even the best of pdocs experience frustration and failure. (I'm not sure what "failure" means because what parents want is "cure" or something darn close, and some mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder, require lifelong meds.)

As parents watch the effect of meds on their child, sometimes they are pleased to find their child restored to his or her "real self" — a happy, functioning child much like any other child (only much more special, of course!). But sometimes they watch is dismay, fear, or frustration as med after med is tried and abandoned. Sometimes it boils down to a terrible choice between meds that merely suppress some of the worst symptoms that at least keep the child from the most risky or dangerous behaviors.

Parents do the best they know how. The dreams they had for their babies may be downgraded over time. Expectations of college shrivel into a prayer for a high school diploma. When report cards are full of F's, parents begin to think D's are not so bad, as long as that diploma is forthcoming. When the child drops out of school (sometimes with the school's blessing), the hope for a diploma turns into a wish for a GED. When neighbors sic CPS on parents for all the noisy commotion in their house, when a truancy court is breathing down parents' necks due to a child skipping school, or when police are carting your child off to jail for crimes fueled by mental illness — at times like these, labels and powerful medications are a parents' last resort and only hope for their child and their family's future.

Your parents never dreamed your future would be anything but rosy under their loving care. They made choices no parent should ever have to make. If you and your child are lucky, you won't be faced with such a terrible choice. But if you are someday faced with a terrible choice, you will agonize over whether treatment involving labels and meds is something you would never do TO your child or whether it is something you must do FOR your child. Either way, you will feel heartsick as you struggle with the decision. Whatever you decide, it will be the right decision at the time. If the results are good, you'll congratulate yourself, and if it doesn't, you'll feel guilty. Regardless of the outcome, you will have done the best you knew how.

Daunna Minnich
Moderator, JBRF Education Forum