I'm sorry, that "excuse" crap is stupid.
I have bipolar disorder. You don't "fix" a bipolar with harsh treatment. You run a grave risk of killing him/her. Bipolars *will* suicide--they don't just attempt, they do it. And you may have no warning at all, at all.
If he wasn't taking his medicine, he probably did need to be committed. Punching his mother in the back is the kind of violent outburst you can get in a bipolar who's off his meds. He's not rotten, he's just crazy and off his meds.
He needed to be committed to a more traditional mental hospital that would get him stabilized on his medication, and then brought home under the condition, from his parents, that he would stay current with his medicine and keep all appointments with his pdoc and therapist. And that if he didn't take his medication he'd go right back into the hospital. (Because he's dangerous to others off his meds, and the danger will tend to manifest as a sudden rage with no warning at all.)
Bipolars are frequently terribly forgetful.
His parents needed to take responsibility for handing him his medicine when it was time for him to take it, watching him take it, and taking him to his pdoc and therapist appointments.
Once taking care of his illness became an ingrained habit, they might eventually be able to let him manage it himself. Until then, when he didn't take his medicine, they shouldn't have treated it like it was his responsibility and his problem if it didn't happen---we're talking about a seriously mentally ill boy, here. They needed to step up and see to it that their disabled son *did* take his meds at the appropriate times.
If WWASPS appeared to have any benefit at all, it was probably *solely* because they were making him take his meds regularly.
I'm functional, but I'm in the upper 90% of functionality for bipolars.
It is not at all uncommon for bipolars to be on permanent, full Social Security Disability. And SS disability is generally hard for people to get---if they say you're disabled, you're *very* disabled---and a lot of bipolars are.
This kid isn't "troubled"---he's broken. He was broken before he was sent to WWASPS, and the only effective thing they did for his behavior (besides traumatize him into learning to put up with bullshit) was probably to ensure he took his meds regularly. And the learning to follow rules could have happened easily without the trauma---once he was stable on medication. It's the stabilizing on medication that he needed.
No amount of "work" in or from any kind of therapist will cure bipolar disorder. There. Is. No. Cure.
Not yet. Maybe someday, but not yet. And when they do cure it, it will be a medical intervention like gene therapy that does it, because bipolar disorder is a degenerative brain disease with a *heavy* genetic component. The medication stops the progress of the brain damage and allows some of it to heal. But it doesn't cure the underlying condition, it just treats it. Stop the treatment, and the damage resumes and progresses.
There may be environmental triggers involved, like there are for diabetes or high blood pressure, but like diabetes and high blood pressure, once you're sick with it, it doesn't go away. And we have no frickin' clue what the environmental triggers are, so there's no chance of avoiding them by modifying your behavior. If you're genetically prone to heart disease, sure, you can eat right and keep your weight down and exercise. If you're genetically prone to bipolar disorder, nobody knows *what* the hell to tell you (or your parents) to avoid to keep from getting it---or in what percentage avoiding some as-yet unidentified environmental trigger would be effective.
No amount of "work" would have fixed this seriously mentally ill boy.
If he takes his meds, a therapist *can* help him learn to manage his disorder better and cope better with life. Maybe. Depending on how well his condition responds to medication. Some bipolars' illness does not respond to any of the drugs we currently have, and for most finding a combo that works is trial and error on the part of the shrink.
Doing "work" indeed!!!
You frickin' ignorant snake-oil-selling QUACK!!!!
You people don't have a cure for bipolar disorder, so quit fucking lying to desperate parents and pretending that you can "fix" the major mental illnesses that have a biological basis. You fucking can't. And the entire psychiatric profession knows damned well you can't.
The National Institutes of Mental Health's verdict is in on your type of "work" as a treatment for the major mental illnesses. Their verdict? ***INEFFECTIVE AND FREQUENTLY HARMFUL***
God, we need the FDA or its equivalent to have the same control over "therapies" or "work" that purport to treat mental illness. WWASPS should have to post big warning labels all over their web pages and marketting stuff clearly stating that their "treatment" is ineffective and harmful for seriously mentally ill children, and if they don't they should be jailed under the very same charges a patent medicine salesman would be if he was trying to sell a bogus "cure" for cancer, because it's the same exact damned thing.
Timoclea
:flame: :flame: :flame: :flame: :flame:
(Oh, and not only am I bipolar, and the parent of a bipolar, and the daughter-in-law of a bipolar, and the cousin and niece of a bipolar, I have a degree in Psychology from a national top-ten public university. Anon? You're an idiot, and what's more, you're a dangerous fucking idiot.)
