Personal Experience
..., like color guard and the girl’s tennis team, hoping she would like them and keep with it, ditching her old ways and her old friends. However, that did not happen. In the middle of her sophomore year, she decided she did not want to live at home. She hated being there. She hated everyone who lived there. This was the first major turning point in her life. Karen then started to run away from home at least once a week, filling our household with craziness. The last time she ran away from home, my parents were advised to send her to a group home. Thinking of Karen’s best interest, they did so, and she seemed to like being there for the first six months. The staff would take everyone to movies, the mall, to football games, amusement parks, and out to eat. To her there was no better place to be. She lived with a dozen other teenagers that were all in similar situations. She had others to relate to and talk to whenever she needed that kind of attention. However, just like home, this group home eventually got boring to Karen. She no longer wanted to be there, so again she started to runaway. Because of her constant taking off, she endured many mental evaluations. In the second assessment, her doctors diagnosed her with ADHD, which stands for Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder. She was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder. This disorder causes her moods to change like the flipping of a light switch. To my parents, the knowledge of her condition was a relief, but, in the end, there was no easy answer to this problem. We were told that because of Karen’s age, which, at the time, was 16, no one could forcibly make her take medication or receive counseling for her disorders. This was devastating. If she did not want to, she did not have to. Karen chose to not have counseling or receive medication. She continued to runaway for the next month, being found as far away as Newark, NJ, fo...