‘It’s a hidden epidemic’

Alex crouched by New Jersey railroad tracks, waiting for a train to run over his 11-year-old body. “I’m going to stand in front of the train

and die,” he screamed to his father.

Paul Raeburn begged his son to come home.

“I didn’t know what he would do,” Mr. Raeburn said. “[I was] waiting to hear the train whistle or see the light down at the end of the tracks.”

But nothing came, and Mr. Raeburn called the police.

Soon he sat with his son in a small bare room with green metal desks, thinking back to the days when his boy played baseball and built model cars.

Now Alex just wanted to die.

He is one of about 15 million American children and teenagers who suffer from a diagnosable mental illness each year, according to the U.S. surgeon general.

Alex puts a face to the rising number of boys and girls specifically diagnosed with bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive illness, which strikes more than 2 million American adults yearly, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

“It’s a hidden epidemic,” wrote Mr. Raeburn, a former Business Week editor whose tale is told in his 2004 book, “Acquainted with the Night: A Parent’s Quest to Understand Depression and Bipolar Disorder in His Children.”

“Millions of families are alone in coping with the ordeal of children’s mental illness, unaware of how many others are struggling, too,” Mr. Raeburn said. “We all know what it means to sit alone, at night, with a child who might at any moment take a swing at us or another of our children, or run out the back door, or grab a kitchen knife, or swallow a bottle of pills.”

The brain disorder, which doctors usually diagnose in teens and adults, causes vicious mood swings, making children change from hyper to hopeless, rowdy to restless, and back again.

Bipolar has been known since at least A.D. 150, when it was described by the Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia. Many believe Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway all shared the illness. Despite this historical knowledge, scientists have found no test for bipolar.

Even the National Institute of Mental Health reported in 2000 that the disorder is difficult to diagnose because its symptoms often resemble normal emotions and behaviors most children experience, including talking very fast and sleep disturbances.

“In psychiatry, diagnoses overlap and flow into one another, blurring like the colors on an artist’s palette,” Mr. Raeburn wrote. “There is no measure for depression, no blood test to identify schizophrenia or mania.”

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