About
Liz Spikol is executive editor of Philadelphia Weekly. She writes the award-winning column The Trouble With Spikol, which began as a chronicle of her struggle with mental illness, and has since expanded into humorous musings on everything from graphic novels to how to use a mop. She also writes the paper’s book review column, Lit Gloss. This blog — named one of the Top 10 Bipolar Blogs of 2007 and 2008 by PsychCentral — is about mental illness policy, news, personal journeys and more.
“The early evaluations may help find the illness” - hopefully they won’t find it when it’s not even there. I heard someplace that Albert Einstein might have qualified as autistic by today’s standards. Ansel Adams, too, had some kind of severe psychological problems when he was a child. I think either one of those two individuals would have probably ended up much worse off had they been born in these times than when they were.
Liz,
I was at a NJ convention of Social Workers last week, as an exhibitor for NJ DBSA.
I had a social worker come up to me and tell me about two clients she had that were bipolar. One was a child about 3-4, and another was an infant.
I would love to know the criteria they used for determining how an infant is bipolar.
Thanks for finding this article.
Persons receiving treatment for a mental illness speak of having received the “prophecy of doom”, i.e. too sick for too long to get any better. Is the following foreseeable? A psychiatrist says to his patient, “Let’s see you have been in treatment since you were six months old and you are now five. I fear you are not going to get any better and will have to accept the limitations associated with your chronic mental illness. Oh, do you have enough medication?”
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