The Bipolar Organisation is running its Annual conference on 27th October 2007 at King’s College London and this year’s theme is Families and Bipolar Disorder (Conference schedule and available workshops are detailed below together with speakers’ biographies).
To find out more about going to this conference (only £18) then call the Bipolar Organisation or visit their website at
“http://www.mdf.org.uk/”>http://www.mdf.org.ukContact the Bipolar Organisation for more details and membership
Jean Wit, Office Manager
Tel. 020 7793 2605, Fax: 020 7793 2639
Email: jean@mdf.org.uk, web site: http://www.mdf.org.uk/
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
9.30 – 10.00 Registration
10.00 – 10.15 Chair’s Introduction – Helen Waygood, MDF The BiPolar Organisation
10.15 – 11.00 Keynote Presentation: ‘Mental Illness – Understanding the Genetic Dynamic’
Professor David Porteous, University of Edinburgh
11.00 – 11.15 Families and Bipolar Disorder: An Introduction
Michel Syrett, Editor, Pendulum (MDF)
11.15 – 11.45 Families and Bipolar Disorder: A Global Overview
William P. Ashdown, Mood Disorders Society of Canada
11.45 – 12.30 “Planning a Family: A Bipolar Perspective’
Dr Ian Jones, Mood Disorder Team, University of Cardiff
12.30 – 13.30 LUNCH
1.30 – 14.30 Workshops – please refer to the plan provided
14.30 – 15.00 Social Break (Tea and Coffee)
15.00 – 16.15 ‘Families and Bipolar Disorder: Personal Perspectives’
– Making a Marriage Work: Andrew and Heather Heald
- A Mother and Daughter Perspective: The Two Anns
- Discussion led by Michel Syrett
16.15 – 16.30 Closing Remarks
Helen Waygood, Chair, MDF The BiPolar Organisation
WORKSHOPS:
Please note that selected workshops will be offered to attendees pre – booking preferences and that the workshops will located within the conference venue, to be advised immediately prior to lunch
1. Families with Bipolar : “Needs and Support”
Michel Syrett (MDF)
2. Art as a Source of Recovery
Lorraine Nicholson and Jackie Proctor (Perth Plus)
3. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: The benefits to Bipolar Disorder
Dr Warren Mansell – Clinical Psychologist – University of Manchester
4. Nutrition and Good Mental Health
Jane Asto (Eat Right)
Social Get-Together and Opportunity to Relax
Speaker Notes/ Biographies of Speakers
Helen Waygood : Chair of MDF The BiPolar Organisation since January 2007
Helen is a an HR specialist who has steered the charity through a period of intense change, drawing on almost twenty year’s experience working for the organisation as a volunteer and more recently as a Trustee, as well as a passionate belief in its future. She continues to work as an interim HR consultant in the public and private sector
Professor David Porteous is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh and a former Head of Section at the MRC Human Genetic Unit, Edinburgh.
In 1999, he was appointed Professor of Human Molecular Genetics & Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and also Head of the Medical Genetics Section. He is the current Director of the Molecular Medicine Centre, University of Edinburgh, Director of the Genetics Core at the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility Western General Hospital Campus and on the Executive Board of the Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine in Edinburgh, a partnership between the University of Edinburgh, The UK Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK
Michel Syrett is a founding trustee, former chair and guarantor of MDF The BiPolar Organisation.
He is currently Editor of Pendulum the charity’s quarterly journal. He has conducted research into families and bipolar disorder for The Scottish Recovery Network and is the author of The Secret Life of Manic Depression, the booklet that accompanied last year’s BBC2 Documentary Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive. Michel is also a business writer and commentator and the author of 15 books on topics as varied as leadership, innovation and strategy execution
William Ashdown is an active lobbyist and educator, currently Vice President of the Mood Disorders Society of Canada, Founder Member of the Canadian Alliance for Mental Illness and Mental Health and Chairman of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance.
Additionally, he serves on a number of boards for organizations in both Canada and the United States. He is a founding member of the Canadian Alliance for Mental Illness and Mental Health (CAMIMH), serving for eight years. Starting with five organizations, the alliance is now made up of 18 national organizations concerned with mental illness and mental health. CAMIMH is one of the strongest voices for mental healthcare in Canada
Dr Ian Jones is Senior Lecturer in Perinatal Studies in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Cardiff. He is co-leader of the Mood Disorder Research Team which is undertaking extensive research into the triggers and provenance of bipolar disorder. Dr Jones is currently undertaking extensive research into the influence of hormones in women who suffer from bipolar disorder and was author of an article on the subject in the Summer 2007 edition of Pendulum, quarterly journal of MDF The BiPolar Organisation
Jane Aston – Jane Aston qualified as a nutritional therapist with the Institute for Optimal Nutrition which was founded by the leading nutritionist Patrick Holford. A member of the British Association for Nutritional Therapy, Jane has been working within organisations supporting people with a disability for over ten years. She wrote a summary of the issues she raises in the workshop on nutrition and mental health in the Autumn 2007 edition of quarterly journal of MDF The BiPolar Organisation.
Jackie Proctor is a Multimedia Artist, working in mediums of painting sculpture and photography. She ran her own gallery for eight years in Fife, Scotland and a ceramic and Sculpture business in Pitlochry for seven years. She has had many solo exhibitions both at home and abroad. She has pursued her artistic career despite being diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 18. This year she took on the ambitious community project One Leaf – One Link exhibited in the foyer at the Art at the Heart of Wellbeing conference in Perth, Scotland earlier this month. She will talk briefly about this project at the workshop on Art as a Source of Recovery
Lorraine Nicolson has always been an artist at heart but missed her original vocation until severe depression revealed it to her. Up until then she had been trained as a linguist at university and lived life according to others’ expectations. Having now corrected this error she is keen to explore the possibilities of the healing nature of art with other people based on her own lived experience. She has had solo exhibitions of her artwork and photography which have been seen as the visual expression of her recovery
Dr Warren Mansell works as a practising Clinical Psychologist at Salford Early Intervention Service and as a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Manchester. He completed his PhD at the University of Oxford, and his Clinical Psychology training at Kings College, London. He is a co-chair of the national conference of the British Association of Behavioural Cognitive Therapies and has authored over a dozen recent publications on CBT for bipolar disorder. His work has been covered regularly in Pendulum, the quarterly journal of MDF The BiPolar Organisation and he has been a regular contributor to the charity’s conferences and seminars.
The Two Anns, mother and daughter, are long standing members of MDF The BiPolar Organisation Cymru. They wrote a joint article on the dynamics of being a mother in a caring role and a daughter’s perspective of both family life and marriage as someone who has bipolar disorder in the Autumn edition of , the quarterly journal of MDF The BiPolar Organisation
Andrew and Heather Weald Andrew has been an active member for the Wales branch of the charity for over 14 years, more recently becoming Chair of MDF The BiPolar Organisation Cymru, and is a self management group facilitator. Married to Andrew for six years, Heather gained an MA in Literature at Cardiff University as a mature student. She is a regular contributor on the issues and challenges facing carers in mental health for Pendulum, the quarterly journal of MDF The BiPolar Organisation Cymru.
This is what the Bipolar Organisation has said about the Bipolar Parenting programme which is currently running at the University of Manchester: http://www.mdf.org.uk/?o=67897Parents with bipolar disorder are taking part in a study that will give them the chance to follow a highly successful parenting skills programme.
Dr Steven Jones and Dr Rachel Calam at the University of Manchester’s School of Psychological Sciences assess the volunteers’ current mood and experiences of parenting with an online questionnaire before offering some of them help via an online version of the Triple P Positive Parenting Programme that featured on the ITV1 television series called ‘Driving Mum and Dad Mad’.
The Triple P system, developed by Australian clinical psychologist Professor Matt Sanders, is known to be effective in modifying and improving children’s behaviour by rebuilding positive relationships, tackling discipline and setting rules and limits.
The first series of ‘Driving Mum and Dad Mad’ in spring 2005 followed the experiences of five families attending a Triple P group. An average of 4.23 million viewers watched the show, with 500 families taking part in a parallel study by Dr Calam, The Great Parenting Experiment. All the parents who followed the TV series and used the strategies shown reported improved behaviour in their child and greater confidence in managing it. The group receiving additional web-based information and email support experienced an even greater improvement, and six months after the series most of the families reported long term benefits and continued improvements to their children’s behaviour.
Dr Jones said: “Parents with bipolar disorder face many challenges in bringing up their children with key facets of the disorder, such as instability of mood and behaviour, impulsivity and anger problems, likely to lead to parenting difficulties. These difficulties can serve as stressors likely to contribute to distress, destabilisation and possible relapse in the parent. At the same time, recent research suggests that children of parents with bipolar disorder are at increased risk of behavioural and emotional disturbance, which are risk factors both for their own development and for parental mental health.
“This study is a great opportunity for these parents and their children. Triple P is a very good, sound programme that has helped many families. Professor Sanders has used this with depressed mothers and had good results.”
He added: “We hope that this system will prove to be a beneficial, efficient way of delivering help to parents with bipolar disorder and their families, and services can adopt it with little cost to them. There are 60 million people in this country and 1.5% of them are diagnosed with this disorder, which is a lot of people. At the same time there are a very small number of clinical psychologists so face-to-face therapy is expensive and difficult to get. But this study could lead to, say, a Manchester intervention from London.”
Dr Jones and Dr Calam, who are also working with MDF The Bipolar Organisation on this study, are now recruiting more parents who have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, have children aged three to ten and online access.
The initial questionnaire will assess family background, parental and family chaos, strengths and difficulties in the face of child behaviour, mood in terms of mania or depression and patterns of stability such as leading an orderly life and getting enough sleep. This will involve a combination of a standardised measure of child adjustment, a self report measure of parental symptoms and questions designed specifically to establish the extent to which parents think that a parenting intervention would be helpful to them and how likely they would be to take part if one was offered, and a self report measure of parental symptoms. It will thus establish whether the parents would have an interest in a self-directed version of Triple P, as this would be a cost-effective way of evaluating delivery of parenting interventions to a geographically dispersed group with variable access to high quality parenting services, and how their current mood symptoms influence this level of interest.
The first questionnaire will be followed by ten weeks on a self directed Triple P programme for some of the sample and no intervention at all for the others (the control group). This will be followed by a second questionnaire to assess how each area has been affected by the intervention and if the families’ situations have changed. The control group will then be offered the chance to take part in the Triple P programme.
· To take part in the study, volunteers can contact reachingabalance@manchester.ac.uk, or register on www.reachingabalance.org.uk
For more information or to arrange an interview with Dr Steven Jones or CASE STUDY contact Media Relations Officer Mikaela Sitford on 0161 275 2111.
The University of Manchester (www.manchester.ac.uk) is the largest higher education institution in the country, with 24 academic schools and over 36 000 students. Its Faculty of Medical & Human Sciences (www.mhs.manchester.ac.uk) is one of the largest faculties of clinical and health sciences in Europe, with a research income of around £51 million (almost a third of the University’s total research income).
The School of Psychological Sciences (www.psych-sci.manchester.ac.uk) was founded in 2004, and comprises the oldest Psychology department in the UK together with Human Communication and Deafness and Clinical Psychology divisions. All were rated 5/5 in the last higher education Research Assessment Exercise.
MDF The BiPolar Organisation (http://www.mdf.org.uk/) works to enable people affected by bipolar disorder / manic depression to take control of their lives. It supports and develops self-help opportunities for people affected by manic depression, expands and develops the information services about manic depression, influences the improvement of treatments and services to promote recovery, decreases the discrimination against and promotes the social inclusion and rights of people affected by manic depression
Well, here’s a story of another mother with Bipolar. I hesitate to put this one on this site as her story is a double edged sword in many ways; on the one hand it shows that mothers with bipolar are still able to look after their children despite being very ill, on the other hand if I was as ill as she is (which I am definitely not as I don’t have the symptoms she describes by any stretch…….) I’d be constantly worrying about whether or not I was damaging the children. I admire the mother for having the courage to talk about how difficult things are for her. I would love to know what her children think……I’m sure she is worried about that otherwise she wouldn’t have put her story on the website that I found it on: “Raising children network” – an Australian website. This website has a section dedicated to parenting with a mental illness and there is a profile of a mom with Bipolar which makes interesting reading…..
http://raisingchildren.net.au/articles/parenting_with_a_mental_illness.html#mentalglance
‘I split from the kids’ father at the end of 2000. He claimed I was an unfit mother but eventually custody worked out at 50/50. For the last 18 months things have been getting so much better than they were. Before that I was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and I overdosed and went into a coma for six weeks. It took me six months to walk again, I nearly died and I had to have heart surgery. Sometime after that I realised how lucky I am with friends and family and how much I love my kids. But it’s still very hard.”
She goes on to say that the children are amazing and that they find her harder to cope with when she’s high then when she’s depressed. Clearly both they and she find the situation hard but are working with it so that they can be together.
The thing that really bothers me about this kind of article is that it doesn’t make it clear whether the person has Bipolar 1 or Bipolar 2. THIS IS A MAJOR DIFFERENCE!!! If you have Bipolar 1 then the highs are indeed very frightening for both the sufferer and those around them. But if you have Bipolar 2, then the lows are the moods that are problematic – not the highs as the highs are so mild that they usually go unnoticed. What I don’t understand with this person in this story is that she says she goes really, really high and yet she overdosed too…………?
The article goes on to give some stats about mental illness and parenting:
Approximately one in five adults has a mental health problem in Australia and there’s a good chance that many of these will be parents.
- From the age of 35, women are more likely to have mental health problems than men.
- Around 30-35% of people using mental health services have dependent children.
- Parents in lower socioeconomic groups are more likely to suffer from a mental illness.
- Those with a mental illness are at a higher risk for substance abuse and other health problems, particularly those in the lower socioeconomic groups.
- Around 1.1 million people in Australia live with depression.
- Around one in five people will experience depression at least once in their lifetime. More of these will be women than men.
What do you think? Should the mother described be “allowed” to parent her children? Are the children suffering? If they are (and it’s probable that they are), is their suffering worse than it would be if they were without their mum?
I am fortunate enough to have a great personal friend who is a psychologist. She has been living in another country since just before my diagnosis so wasn’t around when I was admitted to hospital and received my diagnosis. She has now returned to live in the UK and has been spending time with me again. She is horrified – and I use that word without exaggeration of her feelings – about the diagnosis.
First off, she just doesn’t consider that I have the illness: after all, she has known me since my eldest daughter was 3,( so for 6 years in total) and through all those years when my children were very, very young. Our children are the same age so she knows how stressful and difficult it can be but she thought I was rearing them perfectly well. She’s a child psychologist so has a good idea about what constitutes “good parenting” and what doesn’t. During this time, I wasn’t medicated so she knew me when I was supposedly “ill” and not on medication. She says it never crossed her mind that I was suffering from Bipolar as she says I never exhibited any signs. She considered me then and now to be completely competent at looking after the children.
She thinks I ought to go and get another opinion, as does my consulting psychologist as do two other doctors who I met over the summer and who witnessed me every day with my children for 2 weeks on holiday (I took the kids away on my own for 2 weeks and these doctors were staying in the same resort: our children got on famously). None of these people consider that I am ill.
Secondly, she has asked me what good the label has done for me. In her view, it is utterly pointless to give someone the lable of “Bipolar” as it doesn’t do the sufferer nor anyone else any good at all; it just causes numerous problems. She argues that the treatment would remain the same regardless of the label: ie an anti-depressant and a mood stabiliser. She says that many people she knows are on mood stabilising drugs but they haven’t been given (or don’t disclose) an official label. As such, they don’t have to go through the inconvenience, anxiety, pain and humiliation of informing insurance companies, the DVLA, their employer, friends, family etc or have it used against them in Children’s Act proceedings.
My own view, having suffered so badly from the consequences of having been given the label over the past 3 years since being given the diagnosis is NO IT ISN’T HELPFUL AT ALL!!!
It has ruined my life – and I’m not exaggerating. My relationships with my husband, with some of our friends, with my work, with the Court hearing, with neighbours, with the children’s schools, with my son’s medical team: all of these relationships have been tested and to what end? None of them needed to know – it hasn’t helped any of them, nor me. If I had simply gone to the psychiatrist, quietly took the recommended medication and kept my mouth shut, nobody would be any the wiser and my life might have stayed intact.
As it is, I took the view that I had to tell people as a “responsible” thing to do as I was “ill” and therefore people ought to know in case I had some kind of breakdown and then people would be able to know what to do. NONSENSE!!! They still don’t have a clue what to do if I become ill. They still don’t understand the illness in any event, nor do most of them take the trouble to try and understand it. My true friends couldn’t give a stuff anyway: they have all told me that they don’t care whether I have the illness or not, they treasure my friendship and that’s all they care about. My family are all convinced that I am not ill and are behind me regardless of what any medical team say: they love and support me. My employer still doesn’t know because I don’t feel I can risk my job: no matter what the legislation regarding Disability Discrimination, it isn’t going to make a blind bit of difference to whether or not I would remain employed. Yes I could sue, but where would that get me? A few months loss of earnings if I’m lucky and after I’d spent even more months in highly stressful litigation and incurring more legal fees. Pointless.
No, the only way to live with an illness like Bipolar is to keep it from everyone (except probably your blood family) or be so famous like Stephen Fry that nobody gives a stuff, least of all Stephen as he is already a success and has no children to worry about……..Good on him (and I mean that – I think the guy is great!) But I’m not in that position so, from now on, I’m going to keep quiet about it and pray that I don’t ever have to tell anyone else………………and maybe I can gradually rebuild my life.
I received this very interesting comment yesterday which I have posted but thought I’d give it a post all of its own to highlight it. I am personally going to follow this up and will keep you informed of how it goes……
Hi there
I was very interested to come across this website, and would like to alert you and the readers of this website to a study we are conducting at the University of Manchester. It is a parenting intervention, as parenting can be difficult at the best of times.
If you are bipolar and have children aged between 3 and 10 (inclusive) then please have a look at www.reachingabalance.org.uk
Thank you
I’ve read the site and think the whole concept of helping parents with good coping strategies when the going gets though is vital. If this kind of course were more readily available for parents struggling with Bipolar, it may reduce/prevent the kind of experience I have had with the Courts as presumably this course will help substantially.
I’d be interested in any feedback on anyone who does get on to the programme.
