depression and dyslexia

Both of my kids have depression and dyslexia. My son has ADD/depression and my dd has Bipolar Depression.

Its not unusual for kids who really struggle to have difficulty with depression. If the depression is mild, therapy and exercise can really help. If its severe you may want to consider medical intervention, therapy and exercise. Sometimes medication is only needed short term to get them initially better so that therapy can be more helpful.

Yes! I am disthymic dysthimic???

I don’t believe clinically speaking children and adolescents can be diagnosed with bipolar? Atleast i have read that in numerous places. The use of drugs for bi polar became sickeningly common in kids with ADHD etc, because the drug companies wanted to know more about it. Paxil, for example is like to my understanding no longer legal to even prescribe to children.

There are some more recent schools of thought that are saying ADHD is early symptoms of bi polar… Or bi polar in children. But based on what i have read i would think twice before continueing to use a shrink that diagnosed my child who by the very nature of being a child can not be bi polar which is accepted by the majority of the scientific community or so my reading indicates. I will try to refind some of it later for you.

Also, i believe it is very depressing as a dyslexic with ADHD to always be told i am stupid by society. The disrespect and cruelty we are subjected to kind of…. I believe, over time causes brain chemical issues to happen. Being treated differently and put under a microscope and treated as subhuman by all those experts…. It hurts. I wonder how much dysfunction post labeling is actually a direct result of the cruel and unusual labeling process itself.

I would keep my kid off of all medication, so long as they are not a threat of a physical nature to themselves or others. Instead i would find a better way to deal with my kid and do all i could and then some to have my kid treated as normally as possible. If, when they become adults they are diagnosed bi polar…. Well maybe they really do have it. In which case, it would then be their decision how to treat it. I think that is the best way to handle it as a child who’s parents forced pills down my throat often using extortive and physically violent methods. I think medication needs to remain a last resort. I think there are numerous ways to handle these issues and one needs to find these methods before reaching for chemicals which may alter the brain’s development which starts at birth and continues into the mid 20s before it is fully developed. Yes they all want to know what their nifty new drugs most immediate effects are. But no one seems to give a damn about the long term effects of the drugs on the development of a child’s brain as there has been little to no testing done on that. If we were valued by these experts as people more would have been done on that front to make sure we were not damaged long term. To them, we are already damaged useless sacks of skin and they try to make others view us the same way. They don’t seem to understand, our minds are different not inferior. We still think and we still feel. We still grow as people. Struggling itself is hard enough but with the messages pased to us by society… Ofcourse many grow up very very very depressed. I personally think my dysthimia, is a direct result of being force fed a whole host of drugs. They diagnosed *me* once with bi polar. It was laughable as my mother actually stood up told the doc he was a quack and stormed out hauling me with her. You see, i had my down times, but half of diagnosis of bi polar means there are the manic episodes too… I never had a manic episode in all my life Not until good old paxil made me mental. So there they were medicating me for bi polar but the medicine was making me mental. So what did they do??? They added a downer to my upper…. then a drug to help me sleep ofcourse none of these drugs helped at all and i kept telling them that but they always wanted me on it a little longer so they could report back to the drug company their findings. Zoloft, paxil, depacote which made me gain over 100 pounds in just under a month. I wish i was joking. I was 110 pounds at 17. Then the depacote for nearly a month….. Nothing else changed…. I was still active…. And for no reason except popping the pill i ended up 219 pounds less than a month later. Real good for a 17 year old girl’s self esteem. The doc actually wanted me to keep taking it… Mum had finally had enough of their bullsh*t though by then…

What is next??? Are they going to say that people with LD just don’t see the world normally which means we are all delusional and start pumping us full of medicine for schizophrenia?! When does this mind set of ‘test the dangerous stuff on a specified group of ‘throw away’ children’ going to end???

I am a student, of archaeology i have plenty of experience in the field. I am dyslexic, and my emphasis has been in 2 areas but one more so than the other. The first lesser emphasized would be studying the evolution of man. The second is egyptology. I am dyslexic. I am also fairly fluent in some 6 languages, western music notation and theory as well as ancient greek music notation and theory. On top of that, my jobs have included translating hieroglyphs and hieratic scrip and even old coptic. Because i am dyslexic and an epigrapher. No thanks to their medicine. What i am not, is someone less worthy than chimpanzee who is being used for drug testing.

Mandi, your information is very incorrect and I would question your sources. Children and adolescents CAN be diagnosed with bipolar. My dd was dx’d at age 8 and has been doing wonderfully with appropriate medication. At 16 she is very aware of when her moods are getting “beyond typical” and works closely with her pdoc. Without appropriate medication and supports she would not have survived as she was suicidal at age 8.

I also have a son with ADD/dyslexia and mild depression. He does not require medication at this time but uses supplements and exercise.

I used to think that medications were evil and I did everything possible not to start down that path. However, my dd became increasingly troubled, depressed, manic, anxious, paranoid and was having hallucinations. Medication saved her life. People who have never lived with this don’t understand the difficulty in making such a decision. It was neither easy, nor do I believe in any way that my dd is a “throw-away”. I find your comments extremely offensive. I’m sorry that you did not have a good experience but if you were to talk to my dd you would know that she feels that being appropriately dx’d and medicated have allowed her to be “typical”, to have friends, do fairly well in school, volunteer in an elementary school and, some day, hold a job. She has spoken of being a child with bipolar at a NAMI forum to try and help others understand what it is like for her and others like her.

Oh, and she not only has dyslexia but also dysgraphia, dyscalculia, auditory processing disorder, sensory integration and scotopic sensitivity syndrome. She has gone through a lot in her short life and is a stronger, more compassionate person for it. She has used what she has learned over the years to help other students with disabilities, spoken up to teachers about accommodations for kids who have trouble speaking for themselves and is a wonderful advocate.

Yes, my dd has bipolar disorder and I couldn’t be more proud of her because it doesn’t define WHO she is but what she struggles with. Stigma and incorrect information is what we have to fight.

hmmm? I was reading some book…. damn it… something about understanding depression, right after i got diagnosed with Dysthymia. The whole thing was about more or less bi polar (most were) and i had a lot of trouble finding anything relating to my form of depression. I know that there are certain medications not really legal to give to children which would include Paxil…. If my information is faulty my apologies and thank you for correcting me… Giving out bad info has never been my goal. I never looked at the internet for the child depression bit. The books came from the library of a university that i refer to as ‘truck stup university’ in a rural area about 3ish hours from Winnipeg. It might be they are very old books. I wasn’t really noticing as i was looking more for info on my own diagnosis.

But now i am looking into it. Oh wow… Seems you are right…. Maybe the books i had were actually very old…. But it seems many feel drugs are not apropriate for kids with this psych issue? I honestly, feel every case is individual and different people have different needs… I DO feel though, that we over medicate our kids as a general rule in the USA. Though i am not saying medication is *always* wrong.

I am sure your daughter is amazing she sounds like a wonderful person. It is nice to see a parent expressing such a deep feeling of love for a child. I find that my own experience leads me to feel that not all parents are so able to truly love their kids once a ‘flaw’ has been found. It breaks my heart.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/psychiatry-makes-war-on-b_b_103337.htm

It can be a rough road to walk and i feel that often the most ‘feeling’ way to handle it can be over looked and otherwise not taken for numerous reasons mostly out of an effort to help. Your daughter can advocate it seems for herself and others quite well. It is nice to see someone who realizes having LD and being helpless and hopeless are not the same thing.