When I was 12, I had a traumatic experience that lasted six months.
Due to the trauma, I eventually was taken to a terrible psychiatrist and I was misdiagnosed with depression. However, as each medication made my behavior more and more sporadic and my moods more and more unstable, I simply stopped taking them and refused to go to the doctor. After this, I spent four years of my life self-harming.
Last summer, I decided enough was enough. I needed help. It took my father four months of arguing with my mother and me, and three failed attempts to place me in a psychiatric ward to finally make me an appointment with a good psychiatrist.
Through the ages of 12-16 I made many impulsive decisions that made my life much more difficult than it needed to be. I succeeded in not only making myself worse, but making everyone around me miserable. Throughout all of this, I’d known what I had. I simply couldn’t get the treatment I needed because my father refused to listen when I said I needed help. He let his pride and ego get in the way of my mental health, even though he could see the physical toll my poor sleep schedule, self-harm, and rapidly-cycling moods were having on me. I was just “overreacting and moody.”
I was diagnosed as bipolar. Not only had the first psychiatrist refused to listen to my family’s mental health history, but he had given me only depression medications even after I said they made me worse, which is a big sign of bipolar disorder! 3.1% of older teens have reported symptoms of bipolar disorder. 2.5% of all teens meet the criteria for bipolar disorder, compared to 3.9% of adults who meet the criteria. However, the average age of onset for bipolar disorder is around 25 years old. So how could teenagers be reporting symptoms and meeting the criteria? Bipolar disorder can actually lay completely dormant for any length of time. It can also be triggered by trauma. For instance, a child could be extremely aggressive, and as they grow older, it “magically” disappears until they experience some form of traumatic event, and then all hell breaks loose in their mind. In a dormant stage, bipolar disorder will not affect the individual at all.
The reason many teens are misdiagnosed when they actually have bipolar disorder is because these psychiatrists aren’t listening to them. Bipolar disorder, due to the median age of onset, is often over-looked in teens because of changing hormone levels. If a psychiatrist isn’t listening to their patients, they aren’t doing their job. 69% of people with bipolar disorder are misdiagnosed and remain misdiagnosed for up to 10 years. Not to mention that bipolar disorder gets worse the longer it isn’t treated. Many experts have started to believe that bipolar disorder is partly caused by an underlying problem with certain brain circuits and the balance of brain chemicals, called neurotransmitters.
Experts also are researching the highly likely possibility of bipolar disorder being hereditary, making family mental health history important to discuss. One in five people with bipolar disorder succeed in killing themselves, and there’s an average deduction in lifespan of 9 years for those diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Whether it’s a parent or a psychiatrist, we need to destroy the stigma that teenagers are inherently moody.
