He adds that, in retrospect, many parents say their children diagnosed with bipolar disorder were different from infancy. They were overresponsive to sensory stimulation, had sleep disturbances, experienced night terrors and later experienced hyperactivity with high levels of anxiety. These children were also easily frustrated and had difficulty controlling their anger. I'm ugly . If a child talks of suicide, such talk should not be dismissed.
Suicide is the leading cause of death among adolescents.
Because depression often runs in families, children's symptoms are often easily recognized by others in the family who may be in treatment for depression. It is often those children in families in which no one else is suffering symptoms who risk having their depression go undetected. This class of drugs includes Prozac, which is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for patients older than 18 but has been increasingly prescribed for children since the early 1990s. There are some controversies about prescribing SSRIs for children, however. Jerry L. Rushton, a pediatrician at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says that more than 500,000 prescriptions for SSRIs are written for adolescents and children every year, and that the drugs are increasingly being incorporated into primary care practice.