I was briefly a welfare mother. I was a welfare mother at a time when my (psych med induced) depression was so severe that I could scarcely get out of bed.

You should know that for many, many "welfare mothers" welfare is a temporary circumstance. Do the research if you like.

The last part of your letter seems to be concerned specifically with welfare mothers whose kids are somehow diagnosed with conditions that allow them to receive money every month. The program I am familiar with is called SSI and is part of the SSA that deals with disability. Allow me to assure you that it is by no means easy to qualify a child for this program. The application process is such that the first application is usually denied almost automatically. It can take well over a year to become qualified. Often those of little means are sent to doctors who get much of their incomes by doing the examinations for Social Security. These doctors do NOT easily qualify applicants. In fact, they go to a great deal of effort to look for fraud.

At the time the child turns eighteen, he or she must usually requalify if the problem that qualified them in the first place has continued. Unless the child is so impaired to need the continued guardianship of the parent (severe schizophrenia, mental retardation), the parent receives no more money from SSI.

I knew an odd woman whose doctors said she was bipolar. I certainly, in my layperson's estimation, thought she was seriously bipolar. For instance, she bought a car, a house, and acquired a new boyfriend all in the same manic week. However, she was never able to complete her application for SSI. I will call her Ellen.

Ellen, when I knew her, was intelligent, creative, and a completely dependant personality. She was a drama-junkie and had panic attacks. She needed other people to help her the way most people need water. She had managed to mostly retain custody of her three children because her parents offered her both child care and financial help. However, when Ellen pulled things like the house purchase (ARM of course), the car (on credit of course), and the boyfriend (drug-addicted ex-con of course), her parents tapped out. They could not afford both her car and her mortage payments. The car was transferred to her father's name. The mortgage payments became her own responsibility. Ellen easily qualified for welfare because her debts so vastly exceeded her income. She simply could not work regularly. She couldn't do anything regularly.

It was the school system who initiated the process of an application for SSI for her two eldest children, both daughters. These girls had been sexually abused by their natural father some years previous. They both were seriously anorexic; one had bipolar disorder and PTSD, and the other was OCD and was a cutter. Without a caseworker's help, Ellen would have never gotten the applications completed at the various deadlines that SSI required. Both girls qualified.

Even so, with off and on welfare, off and on employment, and off and on custody, nothing in Ellen's life was stable enough for her to get better. She also had the bipolar's habit of going off her meds.

When I was last in touch with Ellen, I was trying to get her to finally complete a process of application for SSI. Because she had missed application deadlines for the bipolar, it wasn't a consideration. Instead, Ellen faced a whole new problem. Her doctors had decided that Ellen mostly likely now had MS.

Some people have all the luck.

What is manic? Good question. I never had mania. However, I have known many people with mania. I have to confess mania annoys me. It can take various forms. Talking too much, talking too fast, and talking too loudly. Talking right up in your face. Ideas that come rapid fire, enthusiasms that spark and fade in rapid succession, and an insistence that others pay attention to these and join in. Spending sprees. Sexual indescretions. Calling people compulsively. Taking physical risks. Strange obsessions. Easily succumbing to addictions. Wanton and dangerous self-medicating behaviors.

Some but by no means all bipolars have psychotic episodes.

However, they can be fun, exciting, talented people who are also a joy to be around. Many are highly intelligent. There is a book about how many poets, artists, and musicians throught history have most likely been bipolar. We would have lost much without them. Many think Van Gogh was bipolar, for instance. I believe the book is called "Fire in the Mind" and the author is Kay Jameson. (??? not quite sure I have that right).

I hope this helps your understanding. Others in this thread may want to add more and may know much more than I do.

Her /An Unquiet Mind/ is also an excellent read, and will help those who are unclear about the distinction between normal sadness and depression, or between normal "ups" and mania. She is both a scientist studying neurophysiology and a long-term survivor of a rather serious manifestation of bi-polar disorder. She is frank both about the difficulties that her medications have caused her and the vital role that these same meds played in repeatedly saving her life.

There are often gray areas between a diagnosable illness and an adjustment problem, but there are scores upon scores of cases where it is fairly clear that someone has crossed a line from life problem to serious mood disorder. David Sugarman, you might want to take a look at the DSM-IV criteria for the illnesses you mentioned (you can find listings all over the internet). The manual makes things sound more clear-cut than they actually are in real life, but it will probably help clarify how the profession attempts to distinguish between emotions like stress and sadness and full-blown pathologies. It's not a perfect system by any means, and psychiatric diagnoses are best understood as clusters of symptoms rather than entities in-and-of-themselves. But in a majority of cases it serves its purpose rather well. And in some cases it goes terribly, terribly wrong. Compared to the rest of medicine, we're in the stone age when it comes to the science of mental illness, I'm afraid. Or maybe at least the Medieval period.

Also, to the person who suggested that psychologists are bilking people of money when they try to focus on helping their clients learn to solve their own problems rather than giving them advise/answers - I can see how frustrating such a response can be when you are in pain and/or crisis. A competent, well-attuned therapist should know the difference between a client who is in need of more straightforward support and one who is ready to work on building his own problem-solving skills. However, the psychologist who is willing to keep being the one giving the advise and isn't interested in encouraging independent coping skills in her clients is really the one who wants to keep people in need of professional help. I prefer a therapist who wants to empower me and help me be a wise person rather than one who is focussed only on excersizing his own power and dispensing his own wisdom.