This comment came in from "Just a Mom":

I have a child with early onset bipolar, this story is quite shocking to me. Our psychiatrist is adamant about bi-annual labs as my child takes Seroquel and Trileptal, she wants to watch for glucose and sodium effects from these meds.

While I'm not sure who is to blame in this particular tragedy, I think some is attributable to all involved. Clearly, the parents were over-medicating with the Clonodine and had been given the back story we have about 10-day prescriptions due to "lost" or "destroyed" pills. The father has a questionable history - was there abuse? Bipolar is heritable - did mom have it too? Where was child services? And finally, given all of the above, why wasn't the psychiatrist more careful - this patient should have been being seen weekly given the powerful medication combination. Also - where was the basic education on medication interactions? I can't believe they were giving this poor child cold medication on top of everything else. It's just so tragic!

The seven fold increase in diagnosis I feel is due to the fact this disorder has only been acknowledged in children in the last dozen years or so. It doesn't mean it was never there before, its just that now it has a name. We have been seeing the same scary increases in the dx of Autism - and I personally don't believe it wasn't there before, I think its because the we now have a name to attach to the symptomology.

[Sculpture of mother and daughter by Nancy Schön]