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[quote=Anonymous]My sister was/is bipolar.  She wasn't diagnosed until she was 19, and was an inpatient briefly in a mental health facility at that time, but many symptoms were there years earlier.  As a young teen she would have weird highs and really stormy lows.  She evened out really well on medications, and is so even-keeled now that most people outside the family would never dream that she was ever anything but.  Looking back at photos from when she was around 14/15 it jumps out at you; there she is, looking at the camera with a look of murder on her face while I sit beside her trying to act normal but obviously very uncomfortable.  In another photo from the same timeframe she is running by the camera, face beet red, with a look that would best be described as "out of control happy."  Between that time and her diagnosis, life was pretty rocky around her.  I was afraid of her (I was a year younger and a lot smaller, shared a room with her) because she could be super nasty and sometimes didn't talk to me for a week at a time.  She stole my mother's credit card, pawned my mother's engagement ring, and used up her scholarship money the month she got it by taking friends to the beach and keeping them well stocked in pot.  I remember my mother teary one Christmas morning, and it turns out she thought we had all forgotten her because my sister had returned her gift that we all bought together and kept the money.  She dropped out (or was kicked out) of college her first semester because of *something* she did, worked for a bit and then ran off with some random guy we had never heard of.  He called my parents and told them that something was wrong with her mentally.  We drove 7 hours to pick her up and went straight to the mental health center.

Whew.  The good news is that once she was on medication it was like a switch was flipped.  She went back to college, then got a graduate degree and has 2 good kids who are young adults now, with no obvious mental health issues.  I have always wondered how different those awful years would have been if my parents had realized earlier that my sister wasn't just a "wild child" but in serious need of help.  Your daughter is lucky to have you.[/quote]

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