tales of a bipolar genius overview The early years

As a baby no one would have guessed it. Laura was as happy and normal a baby as any parent could dream of. It wasn't untill she became a toddeler that she started acting diffrently. But even than, no one had any real idea what was wrong. She just seemed stubborn, and she bit people a lot. But that wasn't enough to gvie people any real idea what was wrong.1

It was in second grade that people began to really wonder what was going on. It was there that she started acting out, shutting herself in closets, asking if she could stay inside durring recess, and not making friends with the other children.2

The first Psychologist said it was ADHD. So they tried her on Ritelin. It made her like a zombie, she was tired, irritable, and started missing school because she felt sick. Her parents thought that she was just being stubborn. So they called in the truancy officer to scare her into obediance. It didn't help. The next three psychologists thought it was depression and put her on every antidepressent in the book. That didn't help eather, it just made her worse and worse.3

At the end of third grade, after another year of her acting out and her grades falling fast despite her IQ of 157, her parents decided to send her away to a special class. Her home town didn't offer such a class so she was transported daily to a city near by. At that school she was tortured by bullies, and this caused her grades to fall even more.4

In fith grade they put her in a school for learning disabled children. She seemed to do better there, but she was still acting out, and still miserable. In fact, she was so miserable that she threatened to kill herself twice. So they looked at her home life, and decided her parents couldn't deal with her well enough. She was taken away from her family and put into foster care.5

This didn't help her out much. She was still acting out, and she now began to eat large amounts of food to comfort her misery. Durring the year she was in foster care her parents went to training to try to learn how to better raise her. Eventually she was returned to them.6

But tragedy struck her family while she was away. Her father got sick with CFIDS (Cronic Fatugue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome) and her mom got hit with sevear depression and ended up in the hospital herself for a week. Fortuantly her mom got better and life went on, now with her father ill and unable to work.7

At the end of seventh grade people at her school said she was ok to return to public school now that she had had a few years of special education. Her aprents had their doubts, but they agreed to put her back into the public school system. That was a BIG mistake.8

In eigth grade her GPA fell from a 4.0 to a 1.7. The only reason she was able to get a 1.7 was because of art and music classes. She was unable to pass any of her other classes and did so poorly that the public school agreed to send her to another special education school.9

This school was also no good for her, but not because of bad grades. The school was a joke. They were so focused on behavior that they let academics be poor. She got all A's without ever once studying for a test. Actually, no one in the school studied for the tests in her tenth grade class. They didn't have to. The teacher would write out notes for them to study with, and highlight the answers to the tests questions, than he would let them use their notes duirring the test itself. I am not kidding, that is really how it happened. She tried to protest, saying that it was impossible to learn anything to prepare them for college that way, but no one would listen to her, and they even punished her a few times for protesting. 10

It was at this time that her sister, like her father fell sick with CFIDS. That made two memebrs of the family sick.11

Well, she got really fed up with the school and decided it was time to take care of her own academic future. So she researched online and through books, and found a new school for herself. She also fought with her school system for the right to go there. In the end she sucedded and for the first time in her unhappy life she was getting a good proper education.12

She seemed to be doing better with her mood too. She had decided to refuse the antidepressents that her parents kept trying to force on her, and not being on them seemed to make things better. 13

Unfortuantly, tragety struck her family for a third time, and her brother ALSO became ill with CFIDS. Now, the public school system did not believe that her brother was sick. So they took her family to court. The judge decided to take her brother away from the family, so he went to go live with her grandparents for a while as her family fought for their rights to their children yet again. He was returned to them within a few weeks when the judge withdrew from the case and a new judge was assigned. For years the family had to fight to get him a proper education, and they had limited sucess.14

It wasn't untill she was about to start college that the truth of her internal struggle was diagnosed. It was a neighbor of her grandparents who discovered the true nature of her dissability. This neighbor was a social worker who was a family therapist near Boston. She took an interest in Laura early on in Laura's life, and when Laura was starting college she suggested that Laura might have type 2 Bipolar. ***start next book***