Bipolar Awareness: Day 3

I wasn't diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder until I was 26 - 28 years old, even though I had been fighting depression and manic behaviours since I was 12 years old. Middle School started a strange series of ups and downs and as I was a teenager, pretty much everyone just wrote it off as being an over emotional teenager. But that's what society said it was, if you cried, raged, and sulked for days on end in cycles you were just over emotional.

I went to middle school, thinking that it would be great! It was okay that a lot of my friends weren't going to the same school, I'd make new ones... right? Instead I learned that Elementary School is far better policed than Middle School. Teachers in Middle School have so many children walking in and out of their doors that they can not see the individual in every child and so children get pushed aside.

I was institutionalised the summer between 6th grade and 7th, and it was one of the biggest jokes I've ever had the misfortune to be part of. Group Therapy was just a bunch of pre-teens sitting around sharing what they liked to do and the Therapist just sat there reading a book. We were punished for playing and helping eachother and locked in the "Anger Room" if we disagreed with the Ward Supervisor.

I remember these two little boys, one was 4 and the other was 5, they both had what I now recognise as Autism. They were sweet kids and they were the first to call me Missa(the 3 yr old called me Missa Momma). I would rock him to sleep a couple times a week because he missed his mother and didn't know why he had to be there with the "mean men".

I was so happy when I heard that the place got shut down!