What is Special Ed? -more on labelling

In the previous article "What really is Special Ed." I was concerned about the labels that are attached to young people, especially the behaviour disorders- how they are diagnosed and therefore how children end up in Special Education classes. One of the problems is that the symptoms of these disorders are so overlapping and there are no reliable physiological tests to diagnose these problems.

My concern has been heightened by an article that appeared in Time.com recently ("http://www.time.com/time/health/printout...") entitled "Young and Bipolar". This article talks about how the age of people labeled with bipolar disorder is decreasing now. According to the article..."the average age of onset has fallen in a single generation from the early 30s to the late teens." The article goes on to cite family and school stress, recreational drug use and perhaps even genes as some suggested reasons for this situation. The article is hopeful that research is getting better and better especially in the field of genetics to find the gene related to the condition and that the pharmacologists are arriving at better drug combinations for treating the highs and lows of bipolar disorder.

What troubles me most is the line that reads... "until quite recently, a child who behaved like this (an example given above of a 5-yr old with behaviour problems) would have been presumed to have either Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder or Oppositional Defiant Disorder." This is followed by another statement... "For all that, when the disorder does appear in a child, the diagnosis is often wrong. ADHD is the likeliest first call, if only because some of the manic symptoms fit." And then the article goes on to describe the pattern of behaviour of bipolar children as described by Dr. Demitri Papolos, (research director of the Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation and co-author of The Bipolar Child). This is followed by another statement..."Preverbal toddlers and infants cannot manifest the disorder so clearly, and there is no agreement about whether they exhibit any symptoms at all."

The debate about the diagnosing and misdiagnosing especially of behaviour disorders will not be over in the near future. There is too much to be learned still about how the brain works and how the chemicals in our body affect our feelings and the connection between our feelings and our behaviour. There is much for us to understand about how humans naturally behave if they were not blocked by the feelings of others that get triggered in some circumstances. Usually the natural behaviour is useful; it is the inherent attempt to release some unwanted feelings. For example, how we would shake until all our fear was gone, or cry until all the grief was released if no-one interrupted us with words such as- "pull yourself together", or "big boys don't cry." One parent reports in the article that she knew her son was bipolar in the womb because he "was active 24 hours a day".

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