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History Welcome to the website of the TriState Support Network for Families with Bipolar Children! In the summer of 2002, Tina Fay and I hosted our first support meeting for parents of children with early onset bipolar disorder. Having bipolar children ourselves, we discovered we were finally in the position of being able to give back to the community of parents who were struggling to raise their bipolar children and teens. Our experiences working on the executive board of the Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation placed us in daily contact, via email, in person, and by telephone, with parents who were perplexed and devastated from parenting their bipolar children. Having "been there, done that," Tina and I realized that our years of interacting (not always positively) with physicians, therapists, schools and teachers, child study teams, hospitals, family members and friends, had given us an education that we never imagined we would ever need. Five parents (including Tina and myself!) attended our first meeting in Rye, New York. Nine parents attended our second. Now, one year later our support group membership has grown to over 100 members with parents from Bergen county in New Jersey, Westchester, Rockland, Dutchess, Orange and Putnam counties in New York, and southern Connecticut. We recently found that support meetings, now held in White Plains, were often difficult to attend for many parents who lived outside of the Westchester area. In May of 2003 we broke into three chapters and our group was renamed the "TriState Support Network for Families with Bipolar Children." Our three separate branches, the Lower Hudson Valley chapter, the Mid Hudson Valley Chapter and the Connecticut chapter, offer monthly meetings on different days in different geographic areas in hopes of accommodating any parent of a bipolar child or adolescent who needs support and friendship. We are still new. We are still growing. We are still learning and will continue to learn as much as we can about early onset bipolar disorder. This life altering psychiatric illness can so easily wreck havoc on the best of kids and the best of families. It is our hope that our support system can ease the way for families struggling with bipolar children. Sisalee M. Hecht, Founding Member TriState Support Network for Families with Bipolar Children smhTriStateSupp@aol.com

TriState Support Network for Families with Bipolar Children
Lower Hudson Valley Chapter/ Westchester Chapter/ Connecticut Chapters
2003