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The First Signs
There were signs that something was wrong with Michael Bonis from the time he was a baby. While bright and responsive, he didn’t sleep much and was prone to tantrums. His behavior was so different from his sisters’, his outbursts so vague and sporadic, that his mom, Janice, chalked it up to his being a boy—until she couldn’t ignore it any longer.
It never occurred to her, or to many doctors, that Michael might have bipolar disorder. As recently as a decade ago, many experts thought the disorder (also called manic-depressive illness) was found only in adults. But in the past few years, more and more kids are being diagnosed. Mental health professionals have been rethinking the criteria after finding that many adults with bipolar disorder claimed to first experience its symptoms in childhood. An estimate in a Harvard Medical School newsletter said that about 1 in 200 youngsters is affected, though this is controversial: Some say the number is too high and that too many kids are being medicated for mood swings. But after watching their child slowly unravel for years, Michael’s parents were at the breaking point.
First Signs
Michael was far more exhausting to take care of than any of Janice’s three daughters from her first marriage. After she returned to her job as a marketing operations manager at Unilever, near their Trumbull, Connecticut, home, Michael seemed to adjust to day care. But things went downhill when he turned three and she enrolled him in a nursery school. He became inconsolable when she left, and cried on and off until she returned. The problem persisted throughout kindergarten and first grade. He would sometimes dart out the door of his school, following her to the parking lot. Whenever that happened, the teachers chased after him and brought him back.
Janice will never forget the day in second grade when Michael pounced on her in the hallway, desperate to stop her from leaving, ripping out a clump of her hair. A social worker and several aides were called to get him off her. She didn’t know whether she was more frightened or embarrassed. That same year, her husband, a heating contractor, got an urgent call from the school. “Michael was screaming and kicking, wanting to leave,” says Michael Sr. “I rushed there to stop him from hurting someone.”
His teachers thought it was separation anxiety. Janice figured that they had far more experience than she did, so she trusted their judgment. For almost two months, she brought her work to Michael’s classroom, sitting at a tiny desk beside his. But if she made a move to leave, he flew into a rage. “There was no routine for me. I never knew what to expect,” she says.
Instead of growing out of it, Michael became increasingly irritable and unmanageable at home. His moods changed like a roller coaster, and no one could predict what would set him off. Sometimes it was simply the word no. “We recognized what we started calling ‘the look,’ ” says Janice. “His eyes became almost feral when he was about to explode.”
When Michael went into a rage, it was like a tornado hitting. He threw telephones and chairs, bashed mirrors, kicked in doors and broke the glass door of the bathroom medicine cabinet more than once. After each outburst, he was either remorseful or oblivious to what had happened.
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