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Given my own family history with its “secret” trauma which pushed me undoubtedly but unconsciously into our field, perhaps I am a unique responder to a self-disclosure made by Dr. Wozniak. Unique or not, I do believe that there is a truly superb moment in Is Your Child Bipolar, when Dr. Wozniak courageously says, “I watched my mother be disabled and shamed by her psychiatric symptoms. Without that truly awful and traumatic experience, I doubt I would ever have become a psychiatrist at all” (p. xv).
This resonates powerfully with me, as I am a profound believer in the power of childhood trauma to shape one's destiny, positively or negatively. And that leads to one of my difficulties with the book under review: How it deals with trauma.
My reading of Is Your Child Bipolar is that it is geared more to a general rather than a professional audience. As such, it does do well in putting psychiatric terminology into lay terms. But it fails to share with its readers the complexity of the problems and the academic controversy surrounding the diagnosis of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder (PBD). This book is about youth with non-specific symptoms—problems involving rages, impulse control, attachments, oppositional behaviors, concentration, and mood and affect instability. My clinical experience (Levin, 2009) repeatedly informs me that these are more often consequences of disrupted attachments and early, severe, chronic trauma typically perpetrated within, or at least not prevented by, the family; rather than by a genetically based chemical imbalance which can be effectively treated with the use of medications. Yet the book makes only 5 indexed references to trauma. And the authors define PTSD simply as, “…an anxiety disorder related to a specific incident” (p. 26). There is no mention of Developmental Trauma Disorder (van der Kolk et al., 2005)—complex trauma—which I have found so often to explain so much of what we typically find when dealing with out of control, perpetually angry you