Another Attack On People Suffering From Mental Illness

     From the Washington Post:

The food was nearly gone and the bills were going unpaid, but they still had their pills, and that was what they thought of as the sky brightened and they awoke, one by one. First came Kathy Strait, 55, who withdrew six pills from a miniature backpack and swallowed them. Then emerged her daughter, Franny Tidwell, 32, who rummaged through 29 bottles of medication atop the refrigerator and brought down her own: oxcarbazepine for bipolar disorder, fluoxetine for depression, an opiate for pain. She next reached for two green bottles of Tenex, a medication for hyperactivity, filled two glasses with water and said, “Come here, boys.”

The boys were identical twins William and Dale, 10. They were the fourth generation in this family to receive federal disability checks, and the first to be declared no longer disabled and have them taken away. In days that had grown increasingly tense, as debts mounted and desperation grew to prove that the twins should be on disability, this was always the worst time, before the medication kicked in, when the mobile home was filled with the sounds of children fighting, dogs barking, adults yelling, television volume turned up. ...

Talk of medications, of diagnoses, of monthly checks that never seem to cover every need — these are the constants in households like this one, composed of multiple generations of people living on disability. Little-studied and largely unreported, such families have become familiar in rural communities reshaped by a decades-long surge that swelled the nation’s disability rolls by millions before declining slightly in 2015 as older beneficiaries aged into retirement benefits, according to interviews with social workers, lawyers, school officials, academics and rural residents. ...

“I hesitate to use a term like ‘culture.’ It’s not a specific, measurable metric,” said Kathleen Romig, an analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who studies disability in the United States. “Certain things like toxic stress or nutrition or preterm births or parental depression or genetics” offer a more revealing context for understanding generational disability.

And yet others say it’s about money.

Ruth Horn, director of social services in Buchanan County, Va., which has one of the country’s highest rates of disability, has spent decades working with profoundly poor families. Some parents, she said, don’t encourage their children academically, and even actively discourage them from doing well, because they view disability as a “source of income,” and think failure will help the family receive a check. ...

     For the record, genetic influences account for 60-85% of the risk for bipolar disorder so it is hardly surprising to find several people with bipolar disorder in the same family. Many who are initially diagnosed with attention deficit disorder in childhood are eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
     Bipolar disorder is a very serious mental disorder. Although many people with bipolar can be stabilized with medication to the point that they can work and live fairly normal lives, that is certainly not the case with all. The disability produced by bipolar disorder has nothing to do with where a person lives or what their source of income is. Cutting off the income of people with bipolar disorder doesn't effect any cure. It just causes stress which makes the condition worse.
     With one exception, I don't often see two members of the same family as clients either at the same time or at different times. The exception is families where there's a lot of bipolar disorder.
     By the way, I don't know if there have been any studies, but I think a fair number of people with bipolar disorder get involved in relationships with other people with bipolar disorder producing children who face a really high risk of bipolar disorder. Why would this happen? Well, I guess you could say "birds of a feather ..." or "misery loves company" or you could say there was a lack of alternatives. Sometimes people meet in a psychiatrist's waiting room or in a psychiatric hospital. For better or worse, love finds a way and that's not always a good thing.
     In presenting a family where there's a lot of bipolar disorder, the reporter presented a skewed picture. He would have found it very hard to find a family to illustrate the point he wanted to make, and he definitely had a point he wanted to make, where the genetics of bipolar disorder weren't a major part. Would the reporter have used a family where there was a lot of hemophilia present to make the same point? I think not since he would have known that genetics were the problem, not culture or poverty or living in a rural area. This reporter was almost certainly unaware of how big a role genetics play in bipolar disorder.