Bipolar Depression

My daughter is 10 and we have survived the last ten years by doing our own research. She rages often. We know what trigers her at home, our problem is school. She is always running away and hiding is bathrooms, punching teachers, and throwing chairs. We tried explaining to the teachers that the small things set her off. The school uses a points system and sends home daily reports. She gets five points taken off for not raiseing her hand, talking out of turn, singing, and ect.....
Two hours of stop doing this and stop doing that she loses it and becomes rude with her tone of voice. Then she getts written up, this causes the chair being thrown across the room and we are called to come get her.

My daughter is a straight A student even with all of this going on.

The doctors have said that we are at the end of the line with meds. She is on Lithium and if she cannot contol her anger in school, then she will have to be hospitalized. I can not get though to my daughter. She does not see what she is doing is wrong. How do I get her to see that they are going to take her away if she does not control it better?

Does your daughter have a type of Individualized Education Plan in place at school? That is, the school system acknowledges a illness or disability and the parents, teachers, and counselors come together and draw up sort of like a contract to provide some sort of individualized teaching plan that attempts to teach the student around his or her disability or illness. Sometimes this involves having the child placed in a smaller more "controlled" situation for part of the school day or all of the day and where they get more one-on-one focus for their educational needs. In NC, it is called a IEP/504 Plan and the school system has to abide by it if all parties are in agreement. This may help some with the behavioral issues and not appear to "punish" the child for her emotional disregulation. She is 10, has Bipolar which is a chemical inbalance, and does not have the full emotional maturity an adult has (or should) to really know "right" from "wrong" especially if she has had this inbalance for a long while. The chemicals are playing with her emotions and mental well-being. Unfortunately, I know of many children, young children, that are diagnosed with Schizophrenia, Bipolar, and yes, ADHD/ADD that have many hospitalizations once they are diagnosed due to sometimes simply nature in that they are growing up, hormones, etc. Don't know if this helps or not but if you don't have something like what i mentioned above at school, it couldn't hurt to look into possibly obtaining one. If it didn't work out, it could be nulled and voided.

I teach special ed. kids - middle school - and you can request the school to do testing on your daughter and if you're worried about "classifying" her you can choose to use the classification of OHI - Other Health Impared - my husband was very against classifying our 9 year old son but it was a lot easier when I told him about the OHI classification. Another thing you might try is rewarding good behavior not just punishing the bad. We try to get my son to work towards something. He did very well for three weeks and we took him to a movie and got him a computer game he really wanted, as well as praising him often. Is your daughter seeing a counselor in school as well as out? We have monthly meetings with our son's teacher, occupational therapist, school psychologist, special ed. teacher, the principal, school nurse, the alternate instruction teacher, and his outside psychologist whenever he can make it. We discuss ways to deal with his behavior, what works at home and what doesn't, he's in the 95th% in intelligence so we weren't worried about his academics so much this year as much as his behavior. We got him a 1-1 aide who goes everywhere with him, and a word processor to type on because he had small motor problems and it's hard for him to write. These things have made a significant change in his schooling. He just started doing homework 30 days ago, and is actually doing work in the classroom. We had a meeting five days ago with his teacher and the whole team and she said how amazed she was, that he had cought up with the class in just 30 days. She had never seen a kid do that. I let him know this and his reaction was a big smile and an "imaging if I'd been working with the class the whole year?" He knows that he can do the work but it is harder for him than the other kids because of his disorder. He has 3 breaks a day, where he walks to the nurse's office for 5 minutes then goes back to class. The OT uses deep pressure techniques to help him. Like rolling a ball over his back. A body sock helps too. He had a wedge that he sits on in his chair to help with movement, and stress balls to play with. I am still new to this as my son was just diagnosed as bi polar in February. We've been doing all these things before this excpet the 1-1 aide and his Dana (word processor that he carries around with him). Working in Special Education also helps me have a edge that most parents don't have. If you have any more questions, feel free to fontact me here and I'll give you my email address.