These Children are Suffering Posted on May 2, 2006 David A. Axelson (bio) explains how he got interested in working with kids with bipolar disorder.

My rotation was actually in adult psychiatry, but one patient that I particularly remember was 19 years old, and his illness had started when he was a teenager and really had a tragic implication for his life, with serious manic episodes and depressions and psychotic symptoms that really took him off of a trajectory of, you know, going to college, career, things like that, to really barely scraping along with his family. And, for me, seeing that intact person still within him, you really felt like if somebody could make a difference in this young man’s life and get him back on the trajectory that he was starting on and was supposed to go through, you could really make a difference. But the illness had really knocked his life completely off track and it was quite tragic. So that got me sort of going more towards intervention when folks are younger, and either prevention or at least early intervention and hopefully being more successful at preventing the sequelae of the illness.

But, you know, I hadn’t actually decided to be a researcher in bipolar disorder at that time. I really went through my training, my general adult training and child psychiatric training and sort of revisited my enthusiasm for bipolar disorder as I was seeing very sick children on the inpatient units whose diagnoses were not very clear, and some of them looked like they – adults with bipolar disorder, in some ways, and you know, the diagnostic controversy that’s evolved about whether bipolar disorder can exist in younger folks was really going on at that time. And I found that this was an area that was intellectually very interesting and also had applicability to kids who were suffering.

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