Bipolar Ii Disorder Symptoms – Effect Of This Type Of Bipolar In Children

Bipolar disorder is psychological infirmity in which your mood alternates between extreme mania or obsession, and depression or hopelessness. Make no bones about it, bipolar disorder is a disease that does not take prisoners because there are times when it does kill – about ten to fifteen percent of all bipolar disorder incidences have resulted in suicides over time.

Basically, over a ten-year period while you suffer from bipolar disorder, you tend to have about four complete cycles between mania and depression. However, some forms of the disorder can have you running through both extreme emotional poles of the condition within a single year. As a matter of fact, rapid cycling bipolar disorder can take you there and back again within a single week.

Because of its symptoms, bipolar disorder is also called manic-depressive illness. It often begins when you are in your late teens or early twenties, but it has been known to start up earlier in a few rare cases.

A type of bipolar disorder can take you through severe depression in which you experience painful sadness, negative thinking, and indifference to things that used to bring you happiness. When manic, people with bipolar disorder often feel intensely elated, self-important, energetic, and irritable. However, in this form of bipolar disorder, specifically called bipolar disorder II, your mania tends to not be as serious, often referred to as hypomania. You feel the elation, the energy, self-importance and irritation, but they are not as self-destructive as it they normally would be for bipolar disorder I.

It is not often that you find this condition in children, but it is not impossible either. You should particularly be watchful of your child if you suffer from bipolar disorder yourself, or any other type of depression for that matter. It has been proven by research that children are genetically linked to their parents in more ways than just looks. When a parent has suffered from depression of any kind before, the child is automatically susceptible due to genetics.

This was proven by experiments carried out on identical and fraternal twins. Upward of 75 percent of the time, when one identical twin had symptoms of the condition, the other twin has it too – they share the same DNA, you know. When it came to fraternal twins, the phenomenon was observed only in 10 percent of the test subjects – they share only half their DNA, once and for all proving the genetic link.

When you know that your child is predisposed to bipolar disorder, you want to be careful about their childhood experiences. There is no way to keep them from having bitter experiences, but you can help to see that they learn to manage it earlier on. That way, as they grow up, they will be better able to handle it. If you must use medication, use something in the range of lithium carbonate, but under professional supervision. It does have some side effects that you would not want your child to suffer unduly.

Personally, I favor the anger and stress management route. The Good Book after all says that you need to ‘train up a child the way he should go; when he is old he shall not depart from it.’