Parenting, Psychiatry, and Purpose: Rachel Foreman’s Story

Rachel, a licensed clinical social worker and dedicated mental health advocate, shares her personal journey navigating her son’s pediatric bipolar disorder diagnosis at just five years old. 

Transcript

Mary Baudoin (00:06):

All right, everyone. Thank you for tuning in for this episode of This Ability Podcast. I'm your host, Mary Baudoin and today we are excited to welcome Rachel Foreman to the show. Rachel, thank you so much for being here today. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself.

Rachel Foreman (00:22):

So I am a psychotherapist in private practice in Lafayette. I do see children, adolescents, adults. I've always been a social worker, but I never really thought about going into private practice initially. I was thinking medical, social work and then it wasn't until we adopted our son and realized that he had special needs that life changed for us. We adopted him when he was three weeks old and he at that point was perfect as far as we were concerned and just really almost advanced at everything, it was amazing. I was calling him my golden child. He just was this happy, intelligent kid. All of a sudden, literally one day, and I know the date, we consider it D-Day in my head, he came home from kindergarten and told me, "Mama, you need to take me to the doctor. Something's wrong with my brain." And he was very articulate, I was thinking, "Okay, did you get in trouble today, headache?" or, "What does this mean?"

Mary Baudoin (01:24):

Did teachers reach out to you or anything?

Rachel Foreman (01:25):

No, no. It was literally just this one day. It was November 13th, 2007. I picked him up daycare, or actually, from kindergarten aftercare and he was always a talkative kid. Every day, he'd get in the car and couldn't wait to tell me everything. And that day when he got in the car, I knew he was quiet. And so I said, "Well, do you have a headache?" and he said, "No." "Well, what do you mean you there's something wrong with your brain?" And he said, "Well, I can't control myself," and I said, "Well, buddy, you sound okay." And he said, "Mama, you don't understand. I can't control myself." "Okay, well, we'll talk about it when we get home."

(02:04):

But when we got home, he was acting just fired up in a way that I had not seen him before and I put him in timeout, "Settle down. Chill out a little bit." And at that moment, he went into his first manic phase and it was the scariest thing I've ever seen in a five-year-old. He'd spent a lot of time in timeout. That was just our norm and he was fine with it.

Mary Baudoin (02:27):

Well, and you said it was the scariest thing you've seen. You were a social worker or a social worker, so I'm thinking you've probably seen a lot.

Rachel Foreman (02:35):

Oh, yes, and more in adults. This was a kid I've known since he's three weeks old and this was so far out of character. It was shocking. My husband and I just looked at each other because he was sitting there and almost vibrating. He never even minded me in a timeout. It wasn't an issue. And all of a sudden, he started banging his head against the wall, screaming, "Help," and then got up and ran down the hall and was saying, "Call the police. Tell him to come and get me. Tell him I'm bad." And so we just followed him and we found him in his bedroom with his head under the bed. And I just got down there and I was begging him to come out, "Matt, what's going on? Are you okay?" and he started kicking at me saying, "Mama, get away from me. I don't want to hurt you." And that was the beginning.

Mary Baudoin (03:24):

Was he having any type of headaches or any type of physical pain or it was just more mental?

Rachel Foreman (03:29):

No, he had gotten in trouble that day at school, come to find out, and he had never been in trouble at school before. And all that happened was that the teacher, he was feeling super energetic and probably ramping up into a manic episode. And the teacher was telling him to sit down and he said he couldn't. And so that was the first clue that something was wrong. And then that night, everything went crazy. So I called the pediatrician at 6:00 at night hysterical. I remember looking at my husband and saying, "I don't know what's going on, but I think our life just changed," because it was just one of those moments that you knew.

(04:10):

The pediatrician just said, "Look, just get him out. Calm him down. Give him Benadryl. Do whatever you got to do. Get him to me in the morning," and so we did. And I told him that night, I said, "Matt, whatever's going on, we're going to fix this. I promise." So I put him in bed with me. We woke up the next morning and he immediately sat up and looked at me and said, "Are you taking me to the doctor?" and I said, "Yes," and that began a whole new life for us.

Mary Baudoin (04:33):

At that point, he was diagnosed with pediatric bipolar disorder. Is that correct?

Rachel Foreman (04:39):

Yeah, well, we were so lucky in that the doctor that we had him with recognized it and he told me then, he said, "I think I've seen something like this before." Because he knew Matt, he knew how out of character this was and he said, "This really looks like bipolar disorder." I'm a social worker, mental health specialist already and I said, "No way. He's too young. I would never heard of it this young. I feel like I would've known something by now if that was going on." I honestly thought he might have a brain tumor or something. There's something going on in there. He had told us that the child had ADHD. We knew that, he had hyperactivity.

(05:19):

And I said, "What if it's the ADHD that's making him feel out of control? Maybe he feels like that's taking over," and the doctor said, "That's possible." He said, "We could try medicine for ADHD, and if it is that, then it probably will help." He said, "But if it's not, if it is bipolar disorder, that medicine's going to make him worse."

Mary Baudoin (05:38):

Okay. How did that make you feel?

Rachel Foreman (05:41):

I felt like we have to try and so we did. And within about 24 hours, he started hallucinating and it took us 18 months to get him back down.

Mary Baudoin (05:50):

Wow. Oh my goodness. So how long was he on the medication?

Rachel Foreman (05:55):

Couple days.

Mary Baudoin (05:56):

Couple days. And then it had this very long-term effect.

Rachel Foreman (06:00):

Oh yeah.

Mary Baudoin (06:00):

That sounds like it was just a bad experience.

Rachel Foreman (06:03):

Oh, it was the most horrific thing I've ever been through. I've lost parents. I even lost a baby. It was like ... I was trying to tell somebody what this felt like and I said, "It felt like somebody came in and took my child and gave me another one that looked like him, but I don't even know this child," and it was so scary, and at the same time, I'm missing my child that I knew. Nobody knew what to say. Nobody knew what the prognosis was. It was still very new. There were still so many people saying, "Oh, kids that age can't even have bipolar disorder," and so we didn't know what to believe.

Mary Baudoin (06:42):

Is this something that is hereditary by any chance?

Rachel Foreman (06:44):

Yeah.

Mary Baudoin (06:44):

Okay. It is.

Rachel Foreman (06:45):

We're pretty sure it is. Yeah, like I said, we were so lucky to get somebody who recognized what was going on because the average back then, the average time between when a child started showing symptoms and when they actually got a diagnosis of bipolar disorder was 10 years.

Mary Baudoin (07:01):

Oh, wow.

Rachel Foreman (07:01):

Yeah. That is really why I think back then the prognosis was so poor for kids who got diagnosed with this, because over that period of time, they not only were feeling socially isolated, but were being judged by everybody else, "That's just a brat. You just need to spank them. You just need to do this." They a lot of times would turn against themselves and feel, "What is wrong with me? Why am I like this? Maybe I'm a bad person." And so in most of those cases, either they would just say, "Okay, maybe I am a bad person," and end up in jail or they couldn't live with that fact and they would hurt themselves.

Mary Baudoin (07:40):

How did this affect his schoolwork?

Rachel Foreman (07:42):

Oh, God. So yeah, he was a straight-A student. He was just, like I said, this little perfect little child. So when it started, he was holding it together at school. It happened more at home to the point that I went to talk to one of his teachers about it and she's like, "I have no idea what you're talking about," beyond that one day that he was, once the medicine started and he got manic and all, when I tried to send him back to school, it was a nightmare. His school kept going on lockdown. He literally couldn't do it to the point that I took a leave from my job and I went to school with him every day and I sat next to him. And sometimes I'd go sit in the library for a little while to give him time to see if he could do it, but he couldn't. Sometimes he'd last 30 minutes. Sometimes he'd last an hour to the point that I just had to withdraw him.

Mary Baudoin (08:34):

Okay.

Rachel Foreman (08:34):

First of all, he had to change schools, because at that point, we realized he needed a self-contained classroom. Even though he was intelligent, special education is not just for learning disabilities. We knew he would need to be in a small class with less stimulation and all. He was at J. Wallace James at the time. We had gotten him in and we were so happy, he loved it, but they didn't have a self-contained class. So we had to go where he was zoned and they did and that was Evangeline Elementary.

(09:00):

I didn't know much about the school and I was honestly worried, "How is this going to go?" It actually ended up great. Their SPED teachers were so wonderful, they literally walked through this with us. It was a very messy process of back and forths, "Can he make it to class? Let's try it for a half hour. Let's do half days. Mom can come for a while and then maybe mom can step out. And then we'd have to pull him off for a couple of weeks because he just couldn't function at all, so he'd go homebound and then, okay, let's try again." And we did that literally all through school.

Mary Baudoin (09:34):

So what ended up working, being homebound or was he able to go back to school full time?

Rachel Foreman (09:40):

Yes, he was always able to go back at least for a while. One of the things that happened, we first got the diagnosis, like I said, I wasn't really even convinced that's what was going on, so I actually quit my job, which in itself was hard because they were my friends, they were my support. It was some grieving over that, at the same time was grieving over your child and terrified. I started looking for other places to go. I got on the internet and found, "Where were they doing research on pediatric bipolar disorder?" I found that the University of Texas, I think it was at Galveston, there was a doctor there researching it and so I called the department and got his secretary on the phone and cried until she said, "Bring him tomorrow."

(10:19):

So we picked up and left, went to Galveston and met with this doctor and they started trying different things. They were thinking possibly it was something called PANDAS, a neurological disorder some kids get after they have strep and it mimics really severe psychiatric conditions. And Matthew had just had strep and so we thought, "Okay, maybe. We'll try anything." So they tried them on the antibiotics and all, but it didn't pan out. There was a psychiatrist in town that we had been told was good. He couldn't see us until February and this happened in November. So we kept looking around and we finally got hooked up with a doctor in Baton Rouge, Dr. Joseph Grizzaffi, and to this day, we think he hung the moon. He walked it with us too. Every day, every day.

(11:04):

And between all of us, we tried different medication regimens until we found something that I remember calling him. I'm like ... I'm tempted not cry. I remember calling him and saying, "I recognize him. Something's there. He's coming back."

Mary Baudoin (11:21):

Good.

Rachel Foreman (11:22):

That was the process that we stayed in for years.

Mary Baudoin (11:25):

I did a little research on you and your family and you had mentioned in an interview with Lauren Jeremy that you realized how few resources that are available for families that are facing pediatric bipolar disorder diagnosis. What gaps did you notice specifically?

Rachel Foreman (11:45):

Information first of all, that people knew and understood what it was and what it looked like, that they understood how it presents and plays out differently in children than in adults. And that was among professionals, among teachers, some doctors and just the general public. Because when you have a child who suddenly is diagnosed with cancer or something horrible, some catastrophic illness, people may not understand it, but they understand that they need to help you and that they need to be there and they have compassion for you, they have compassion for your kids.

(12:21):

They come around and say, "Can I bring food?" or, "What can we do? Let me do it." Thank God they do. Well, that doesn't happen when it's a mental illness. They disappear, they run, they have no idea. And half of them don't believe it, just say, "Give him to me for a week. I'll fix him. He's just pulling your chain. He's fooled you. There's nothing wrong with him." It was so hard to deal with because sometimes it's family, it's friends. Now the isolation was probably the worst part of it.

(12:49):

What I wanted to do was try to be that person that somebody can come to when this happens to them and say, "You're not crazy. You're not a bad parent. You don't have a bad kid. Let me tell you how we got through it and maybe it can help you," and we just support each other. Because as parents, you have to take care of yourself because this can absolutely tear you apart. Your marriage, your jobs, your relationships with everybody else and you're so scared and you're trying to protect this child and help them, and at the same time, you having to defend them and defend yourself in every decision that you make with people who just ... It's so easy to call the shots from the cheap seat. They're not there every day. You're out in public and your child is maybe throwing a tantrum and so you just get down there and you try to calm them down, deescalate the situation.

(13:43):

And people are walking by going, "Well, it's your fault if you let them get away with that." And they don't know that your child was suicidal 15 minutes ago. They don't know what's going on.

Mary Baudoin (13:53):

People can be very judgmental unfortunately.

Rachel Foreman (13:56):

Yeah. And I have to admit that I had some of that in me, not that I would ever say anything, but I remember before I had kids walking through stores, seeing ladies pleading with their kids to get up and stop screaming and thinking, "Oh my gosh, I would never put up with that," and I said, "I think God has a sense of humor because he tapped me on the shoulder one day and said, 'Watch this.'"

Mary Baudoin (14:17):

"There you go. Yeah."

Rachel Foreman (14:19):

"I'm going to send you this little boy." And that came with [inaudible 00:14:23] and school lockdowns. Rolling around the floor was the least of my concerns at that point. So never say never.

Mary Baudoin (14:32):

And you also started a local support group, right?

Rachel Foreman (14:39):

Yes, yes.

Mary Baudoin (14:39):

All right, so can you tell us a little bit about it?

Rachel Foreman (14:40):

Yes, and I would love to say, "It's still going now," it's not. I eventually walked away from it when I got the practice going and all that because I felt like my attention was better served there. And luckily now, it's not as necessary because there is a lot more when it comes to resources that are out there now. Yeah, I spoke to some of the pediatricians in town and told them, "If you have kids that are diagnosed with this, give them this information." I did it out at The Family Tree for years. It was for the parents to just come and talk about what they're going through, what the challenges are and we would talk about doctors medicines or, "When my child does this, this is what I've tried and it's worked," or how to write the letters that you need to the school system.

Mary Baudoin (15:23):

Have there been any particular from other families impactful moments or success stories that you've heard from the group or just anyone that's reached out to you that says, "My child was doing this and now things are better"?

Rachel Foreman (15:38):

Yeah, I see a lot of them in my practice, unfortunately, and not just from here. People will actually drive in from Lake Charles and different areas because of my background with pediatric bipolar disorder. And so I have seen a lot of kids with it. And I love everything that I do with my job, but there's something about that that's so close to my heart.

Mary Baudoin (16:01):

Sure, yeah.

Rachel Foreman (16:02):

There was a time when we had been doing this for a couple of years and Matthew was doing everything we told him to do. He took his medicine, he went through the motions, he was miserable, he was not getting better. He did get suicidal one time and told me he wanted me to kill him because he didn't want to live like that anymore. There were times that ... I mean, our only hope was just to keep him alive until he was 18, because at that point, the statistics were not that great that so many kids would try and commit suicide before their 18th birthday.

(16:34):

I remember a day that was particularly bad. It had been just going on all morning, having to hold him down, try to stop him from hurting himself or somebody else. And we were leaving our house to go to Winn-Dixie. I remember backing out of the driveway and thinking, "Maybe a truck will hit us on the way to the store and it will just be over and he won't have to go through this anymore. It'll just be over." And not that I would've ever done anything, but that was the most comforting thought I had at that moment. I think what I like to do is tell people, "Listen, I think I have seen about as bad as this gets. We got it better. He's better. His life is better, so I know if we can do it with him, we can do it with your child." And I can tell the child that too, "We have never found somebody that we couldn't at least get it better, so we will walk with you."

Mary Baudoin (17:29):

I think that your story is very relatable. There's people that are listening that are probably like, "Oh, wow, she just expressed things that I've been feeling." Sometimes people don't articulate that. That's a very real moment.

Rachel Foreman (17:43):

It's scary to even admit that that happened.

Mary Baudoin (17:46):

Absolutely.

Rachel Foreman (17:47):

I can't explain how lonely this road is and how good it feels when you can come to the other side of it and say, "Wow, we got through this." It's like you want to scream from the rooftops, "This is doable. You can get through this too."

Mary Baudoin (18:05):

You also wrote a book. So tell me about that.

Rachel Foreman (18:08):

That actually was Matt's idea. This doctor, Dr. Grizzaffi, when I say he walked it with us every day, he really did. What he had us doing was we would keep a record of everything he was taking, dosages and all, a record of how he reacted, everything that happened that day. At the end of the day, I would email it to him And every day ... This went on for years every day. He would, "Okay, what's going on with this?" Sometimes he'd respond, sometimes he would just keep them. But I ended up with a binder of all these emails and was sitting there at one point looking for something and maybe how he reacted to a medication and saying, "Wow, this is a diary of what happened to you." He said, "Mama," he was probably about eight at the time or nine. He said, "I think that God made me get sick so you and I could help other kids who are sick."

Mary Baudoin (19:03):

Wow.

Rachel Foreman (19:04):

And I was like, "Wow. Buddy, I think you're right," and he said, "Maybe we should show that to people," and I said, "This might actually make a book."

Mary Baudoin (19:13):

Isn't that something that he-

Rachel Foreman (19:13):

Yes, yes, that came from him.

Mary Baudoin (19:13):

That little seed in your brain.

Rachel Foreman (19:18):

Yes, and it was back then and I just finished writing the book when he was 22. It's like, for a while, I said, "I didn't want to write it until I knew how it ended." I wanted to have something to hand people to say, "He's not just been better for a while, but this is where we are now." We got to that point because he did get a lot better. At about 17, everything turned around between medication and maturity. Everything just started coming together. When I realized he's good, he's stable, he's got his license, he graduated high school, he's got a good job, then I said, "Okay, I'm going to go back and do it."

(19:55):

And I picked up that binder and started reading and I had to put it down because I didn't realize how much I had blocked out. It took me a while, months to have the courage to go back and pick that thing up and read it.

Mary Baudoin (20:05):

Sure.

Rachel Foreman (20:05):

Oh my God, it was really, really scary and emotional to go back there.

Mary Baudoin (20:11):

Yeah, the hit of reality.

Rachel Foreman (20:12):

I would feel my stomach turn because I remembered how I was feeling when I was writing those things. And it was really hard to go back and face that again, because as we took steps, we kept kicking dirt over it and walking forward and to let ourselves go back was really scary. And my husband went through the same thing because I had him read over it. What I did was I put all that together. I wrote an introduction. Then I have the section of the correspondence over a few years just to show people on a daily basis what it looks like and what it does to a family because that's in there, "This is what's happening with the family. I think I may lose my job because of this. I have to leave work constantly because they're calling me."

Mary Baudoin (20:56):

Right.

Rachel Foreman (20:57):

So you're seeing what's happening, this evolution over a few years. Then the next section is switching to me as a therapist, "This is what I learned and what I use, some of the tricks I use now with my clients, things about how to help them make friends, how to handle certain situations. One of the things that I realized with my son was that the word no obviously was a trigger for him when he was sick, though you can't say yes to everything. I had raised two children before. I raised my husband's two kids and they were great. Of course, they had their moments and it would just be like, "Look, just go to your room." That was the end of that. Well, that stuff doesn't work with this child. When he's manic, he's not even hearing it.

(21:44):

So one of the things I realized was that I'm going to avoid saying the word no when I know he can't handle it. Maybe I cooked supper and he would say, "Mama, I don't want that. I want pizza." And instead of saying, "No, we can't have pizza," I would say, "You know what? That's a good idea. I'm going to order some pizza Saturday." And it's like, it would almost confuse him because he would look at me and go, "Well, I don't know if that's good or bad."

Mary Baudoin (22:10):

Right.

Rachel Foreman (22:10):

So there are some of these little tricks and there are other much bigger things. And when we'd go on vacation, he would always want to play with other kids. Those social skills were rough with. So we always made sure that we found out what was the coolest toy out right then and got it and had him bring it with him to the pool or the beach and then other kids would see it and say, "Wow, let's go and play with that toy," so they'd come play with him. It was this constant thing of every day, "How do we ... Okay, here's the challenge, here's what we're going to do about it." And so those are a lot of the just things in the book that are just there.

(22:44):

And then the end is what's been going on since. I sent it to an editor recently and he sent it back and was telling me that he would change, move some things around and also that's what I'm doing, but I really would like to have it out by the end of the year.

Mary Baudoin (22:58):

Okay. So it's not published yet?

Rachel Foreman (23:00):

No.

Mary Baudoin (23:00):

Do you have a title for the book?

Rachel Foreman (23:02):

I think it's going to be called Unstable.

Mary Baudoin (23:05):

I like that. Yeah.

Rachel Foreman (23:08):

And it's very raw. It's very raw. In fact, I had to go back and ask Matthew, "Are you sure? Are you comfortable with people knowing this about because there's a lot-"

Mary Baudoin (23:16):

That's a very personal thing-

Rachel Foreman (23:17):

Oh my God.

Mary Baudoin (23:17):

... to put your story out there.

Rachel Foreman (23:19):

Yeah, and some of this is very messy and very personal and this is in the book. I remember a time we were standing in the kitchen and he was probably about nine, eight, something like that, and he saw some scissors and he said, "Mama, will you put those away?" "Sure, why?" And he said, "I'm just scared that one day my brain is going to tell me to cut my penis off."

Mary Baudoin (23:42):

Oh my God.

Rachel Foreman (23:43):

"Okay," and I put it away, but it's just what was happening in his brain was so far away from who he is, but I think if I'm going to give a picture of this that it needs to be real.

Mary Baudoin (23:55):

Because there are families ... If their child has been diagnosed with this, there's probably very similar stories that they can relate to. And I think there's nothing worse than feeling like you're the only one going through something. Like you said earlier, that feeling of isolation, it's detrimental.

Rachel Foreman (24:15):

It is. I don't know how we got through it. Thank God I was not a single parent. Thank God my husband was in it with me. We supported each other. We're absolutely not wealthy, but we at least had the resources to pick up and go to [inaudible 00:24:33] to try those things. We had the education to know how to get on the computer and look up what colleges are researching it. Even with all the advantages we had, it damn near killed us, together and separately. Because it's about a 50% line of marriages that break up already. If you add in a special needs child, it's up over 80.

Mary Baudoin (24:55):

Oh, yeah. Yeah, my first husband and I, we split up just after a few years of marriage once we received Alexis' diagnosis and we each had our different ways of wanting to cope with her diagnosis. And I think people say it can either pull you closer together or separate you further apart-

Rachel Foreman (25:16):

Absolutely.

Mary Baudoin (25:17):

... with what happened. Yeah.

Rachel Foreman (25:18):

And I understand it. It almost happened to us. It just makes sense. You so want it to make sense. If he would do something ... Because I was home with Matt for a couple years, I quit working, but I'm the one who had just been to graduate school, I adopted him in the last semester of graduate school, so I really needed to work. And he's a musician, so, "You stay home with him. I'll go back." If I would come home and he was having a bad day, Matthew was, and then I'd say, "Well, Chris hadn't done stuff the way I had done it." It was like, "Well, if you had done this, maybe it would be ..." And that's just what happens because it's just such a horrible experience.

Mary Baudoin (25:54):

And trying to hold down a full-time job, especially if you're not your own boss. You have to have a very understanding employer.

Rachel Foreman (26:01):

Absolutely.

Mary Baudoin (26:02):

And some people are not that fortunate to have-

Rachel Foreman (26:04):

Sure.

Mary Baudoin (26:05):

... a great boss that can understand the journey that they're going through. What are some common misconceptions that people might have about this disorder?

Rachel Foreman (26:16):

Bipolar in general is misunderstood. People think that, "Oh, if I change my mind a lot, I have bipolar disorder." That's obviously not what it is. For one thing, it does look different in children. Adults have both types of mania. You can have euphoric or dysphoric, but mostly what we see in movies and all is euphoric mania where people are happy and excited and maybe buying too many things or something like that. What we find in kids is a lot of the time it's dysphoric mania. That doesn't look the same. It's irritable and anxious and negative and sometimes aggressive, "These kids look like brats. They look like horrible kids," and that's what a lot of people see. When we find kids who have it but have been misdiagnosed a lot of the time, the diagnoses they received were ADHD and ODD, oppositional defiance disorder, to the point that anytime I see those two, I wonder, "Let's go back and look at that again."

Mary Baudoin (27:13):

Is there a possibility of a child that has autism also having this, a bipolar disorder as well, because that could add a whole another layer-

Rachel Foreman (27:23):

Yeah, a lot of a times, because they will say that they think they're on the spectrum because some of it overlaps. There are kids who have some of those tendencies, but maybe not enough to call it autism, but it can run together. I have a client right now I've been seeing for a couple of years and he has both. Yeah.

Mary Baudoin (27:41):

What were holidays like for you?

Rachel Foreman (27:44):

Oh God. Holidays were the worst.

Mary Baudoin (27:46):

Okay. Why?

Rachel Foreman (27:48):

Because people don't understand it. What we learned was that we needed to go to other people's homes on holidays. We couldn't have people at our house. If Matt gets overstimulated ... Well, back then, if he would get overstimulated or get upset, I can usually see it coming, get a few minutes warning and I could get us packed up and get us out of there. But if people are at your house and that happened one Thanksgiving, which is what taught me, I had to ask everybody to leave about 15 minutes before we were going to eat-

Mary Baudoin (28:18):

Oh, wow.

Rachel Foreman (28:19):

... because I saw it coming and there was nothing I could do to stop it. And it's like you don't want them to see what you know was about to happen. We always, no matter where we went, made sure we had an escape plan. It just had to be.

Mary Baudoin (28:32):

Wow, so you had to think of that everywhere you went.

Rachel Foreman (28:35):

Absolutely.

Mary Baudoin (28:36):

That's a lot of pressure.

Rachel Foreman (28:37):

Yes, yes.

Mary Baudoin (28:38):

Wow.

Rachel Foreman (28:39):

It was and it has blown up in our face many times and it's in the book.

Mary Baudoin (28:44):

How do you balance your role as a mental health professional with being a parent, navigating your son's condition?

Rachel Foreman (28:52):

I wish he could ask him that. Actually, I think it's worked out well, because even though I am a therapist, I can't be his therapist. That wouldn't be a good idea anyway.

Mary Baudoin (29:04):

Right.

Rachel Foreman (29:04):

When you are so personally involved, a lot of times you act out of emotion. There are times that I'll do that with my son still because he's still a boy and he's aggravating and sassy sometimes. I can do that at home, but then I go to work and I see other kids and the way their parents are interacting with them and I tell them, "If you could just do it this way, it would work out so much better." And then I look at myself and say, "Mm-hmm, it works for you too." So then I go home and I do better because I saw it in them. And so stepping outside back and forth has actually been really an advantage because I also step outside of it, but then I can also step in their shoes and know exactly how they're feeling and why they're acting like that in the first place because I felt it and I feel like they trust me because I felt it.

Mary Baudoin (29:51):

Now I want to ask, how old is he now?

Rachel Foreman (29:53):

He's 23.

Mary Baudoin (29:53):

23?

Rachel Foreman (29:53):

Yeah.

Mary Baudoin (29:53):

Does he have any love interest? Does he like to date?

Rachel Foreman (29:59):

He's not real fired up about girls. He's had a couple girlfriends. One thing about Matt was before he got sick and then once he got better, he is the happiest person I know. He is just the happiest-to-be-alive person. You can hear him laughing from across the house. He has developed really good friendships, some of them online, some of them here. He's met a couple girls, though he's not interested in relationships right now. I think he missed so much of his childhood being sick that he's just having fun right now.

Mary Baudoin (30:32):

I think he's just looking for a friendship, a companion, to talk to.

Rachel Foreman (30:35):

Yeah, he's got so many guys that he hangs out with and he's very into music. He's very musically inclined, which is cool because my husband is a professional musician.

Mary Baudoin (30:44):

Right.

Rachel Foreman (30:44):

And even though he's adopted, he fits this family perfectly. So we have a, what do you call it, studio at home and he and his friends come in and they write songs, they record them. They're talking about doing a podcast right now.

Mary Baudoin (30:55):

Oh, nice.

Rachel Foreman (30:56):

So that's the kind of stuff he's working on. Girls are fine, but he's not there yet.

Mary Baudoin (31:02):

It's a low priority.

Rachel Foreman (31:03):

Absolutely.

Mary Baudoin (31:03):

That's good.

Rachel Foreman (31:03):

Yeah.

Mary Baudoin (31:04):

What advice would you give to parents who are at the beginning phase of this journey?

Rachel Foreman (31:10):

Trust your gut. You are the expert on your child. Doctors and therapists go to school, but you know your child better than anybody, so if your gut tells you something's wrong, then it probably is. Don't be afraid to speak up and ask questions and say, "That doesn't sound right. Can I get another opinion?" Just trust yourself.

Mary Baudoin (31:30):

What do you find ... What has been the best resource for you?

Rachel Foreman (31:34):

A doctor who really let me be part of the team. Now there was a book that I call my other Bible and I used to bring it with me everywhere. It's called The Bipolar Child. Now I have practically a library of every book written about pediatric bipolar disorder, but that book, I feel like I found him in there and that's what helped me pull him out. That book by Demitri Papolos was what helped me get through it and I actually contacted him at one point and told him-

Mary Baudoin (32:06):

You did?

Rachel Foreman (32:06):

... I did, that his book saved my son and I think my sanity.

Mary Baudoin (32:11):

Oh, wow.

Rachel Foreman (32:12):

That's just been such a great resource. Barnes & Noble keeps them in stock for me because I've sent so many people to get them.

Mary Baudoin (32:19):

Yeah. And now they'll just need to restock.

Rachel Foreman (32:21):

Right, exactly.

Mary Baudoin (32:23):

Probably reread it every so often.

Rachel Foreman (32:25):

Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Mary Baudoin (32:26):

It's one of those books.

Rachel Foreman (32:27):

I've been through so many copies of it because parents would come in my office and I couldn't even say, "Go to Barnes & Noble and get it," I'd just give them mine and then I'd go get another one because it's like, "Read this. This is your beginning. This is your first step right here."

Mary Baudoin (32:41):

What's one message that you'd want parents to leave with or caregivers who are listening right now? What's something that you want them to know about this disorder?

Rachel Foreman (32:52):

One of the things that's bad about it is the stigma. I always tell my clients that we call bipolar disorder a mental illness, but it's really not. It's just as physically and biologically based as diabetes or high blood pressure. The symptoms are behavioral and mental. This is a physical illness. It says nothing about your character. It's not something to be ashamed of any more than you should be ashamed of developing diabetes. It's the genetic lottery. Letting people know that I think is big for the patient themselves and the families to know that, "This is just something that happens and it's not something you need to be ashamed of. It's not your failure as a parent. It's not their failure as a person. It's just genetic."

Mary Baudoin (33:35):

Looking forward a few years down the road, what does that look like for you, for your son? What does that picture look like?

Rachel Foreman (33:44):

I remind myself a lot, and my husband, we talk about this, how when we stress about little things, we have to remind ourselves that we prayed an awful lot for a long time that our son would regain his sanity and just have a normal life. That's all we wanted for him, "Just let him have a normal happy life every day." I think we still look at each other and look at him and like high five because here we are. I don't need it to end any certain way. Just every day that I look at him and he's happy, it's a victory and that's okay. That's all I ever wanted, so I just want to keep being his mom.

Mary Baudoin (34:23):

Do you consider yourself to be a spiritual person?

Rachel Foreman (34:26):

Yeah, I sure did a lot of praying. I did a lot of praying for 10 years for that to have a baby. It didn't work out. It didn't happen. I did. One time, I was expecting. I had an ectopic pregnancy, and after that, I just said, "I don't want to do this anymore." I asked, God, "Tell me what you want me to do because I've been beating my head against this wall for a long time and it's not working." Right after that, Matthew showed up. I know now that that's what was supposed to be all along. I wasn't just supposed to be a mom. I was supposed to be Matthew's mom and I feel like everything in my life has prepared me for what that was going to entail. He gave that to me, and then as much as we went through with Matt, he gave me what I asked for again.

Mary Baudoin (35:10):

I know Matt was adopted, so what was the adoption process like for you? Was it pretty seamless throughout the start to finish?

Rachel Foreman (35:19):

No.

Mary Baudoin (35:19):

That was a journey in and of itself.

Rachel Foreman (35:20):

That is a whole other podcast. Yes. I know it was also complicated by the fact that we're different races. Matt is Black. That complicated things. Well, it did at first because we had talked about it and my husband and never cared. We didn't want a child that looked a certain way. We just wanted a child. When we started talking to them, we got certified to adopt through Catholic Social Services, but we ended up getting Matthew through foster care. They had asked us right at the beginning if we would consider a child of another race and we said, "Well, it's possible we would, but I would prefer they'd be older, so I could ask them how they felt about it." "Is this something that you're okay with?"

(36:04):

But then as Matthew came along, we started thinking about it and saying, "We have a lot of love in us and we're not silly enough to think that that's enough, but we think that we can do justice to this child if we are careful." We made sure we were living in an integrated neighborhood. We changed churches. We found daycares where not only he had Black peers, but had Black role models.

Mary Baudoin (36:30):

That's awesome.

Rachel Foreman (36:31):

And that was one thing that's always been there for us now. The process was pretty hard and there was a mistake done after we had been seeing him for a while and he was supposed to come into our home. It was actually my birthday, my 33rd birthday, and we got there and they said, "We realized there was a paperwork mess up. He has to stay in foster care another six weeks," and that was so horrible. We were constantly going over there trying to see him. We would sneak him home every and then for nights and just we were trying to bond with this child who had to stay over there another ... It was rough and bumpy. We'd definitely do it again. It was the best thing we've ever done.

Mary Baudoin (37:10):

Yeah, absolutely. Rachel, I want to thank you so much for being here. I have learned so much and I know our listeners have as well. You're a huge inspiration, you and your family, so thank you again for being here.

Rachel Foreman (37:22):

Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Mary Baudoin (37:24):

Absolutely. All right, everybody, that's going to wrap up this episode of This Ability Podcast. Thank you for listening.

Speaker 3 (37:32):

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Speaker 4 (38:13):

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