Bipolar disorder - Issues with academic performance

Children with bipolar disorder are more often than not exceptionally gifted. But the difficulty faced by these kids, lies in their struggle to cope with the numerous requisites of academic education. The bipolar disease often entails numerous syndromes which co-exist along with bipolar leading to what is termed a co-morbid situation. These co-morbid syndromes in a bipolar child can give rise to one or more of the following conditions:

• High distractibility
• Inattentiveness
• Anxiety
• Perfectionism

To add to the child’s woes bipolar medication can also impair the   learning procedure including deficiencies in the motor executive functions, extreme issues with complex tasks requiring  organizational skills and the ability to breakdown a complex task into different simple components.

The result of all these bipolar symptoms, co-morbid syndromes and the medication issues, is that the child struggles with the process of learning and attainment of knowledge. This makes the child almost incompetent in matching up to the several demands meted out by the conventional academic education process.

Various studies and research reveals that the learning disabilities, attention problems, and shortfall in the executive function area are a fundamentally related trait of early-onset bipolar disorder. The major point to be noted here is however the fact that the children with a learning disability almost always have a marked discrepancy between their ability and their achievements. For instance a child with a learning disability may either have a normal or in some cases high IQ, but when compared to their class mates, they lag behind in academic performance by about 2 years.

U.S. Public Law clearly states that individuals can be categorized as having a learning disability when they have the following issues.

• Those who have a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes used for understanding language, either written or spoken.
• Difficulty in practically putting to use language either to speak or write
• The manifestations include flaws in the capability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations.

The learning disability is just one facet of the bipolar disorder issue with academic performance. It involves only the language domains and involves a breaking down of only a singular task area.

The real problem for kids, with bipolar disorder lies in the deficits in the executive functions. These impact all areas of life, both academic and non-academic. Executive function deficits affect the student’s ability to systematize, plan and regulate resulting in difficulty managing and completing complex tasks on time, managing a balance between schoolwork and friends, controlling emotions etc. It is highly probable that shortfall in the executive functions will not become apparent until schoolwork becomes more complex requiring more independent work, more scheduling and strategy. Consequently, a child may not be identified and recognized as having these issues before he or she reaches middle school or even early high school.

For that reason, children with bipolar disorder ought to be put through a wide-ranging battery of tests which will assess the child in the following areas

• Intelligence
• Academic
• Neuropsychological
• Psychological