Luck of the Irish?
When I was about 8 or 9 years old, my little friends and I would comb through the clover patches growing in our yards looking for four leaf clovers.
While we searched for four-leaf clovers we would make little crowns from the flowers. They would have these really long stems. We used to pick the flowers and wind the stems around each other, until we had a chain long enough to fasten together and wear on our heads.
My friend Jennifer was always the one to find the lucky clovers - she would find so many she could string them together into bracelets. In some ways I think she needed the luck more than the rest of us, because looking back now I think she might have been undiagnosed with a bi-polar disorder. Maybe I’m wrong, but she definitely needed some help of some kind, at least for depression.
I wonder how many other young children - as young as we were at 8 and 9 - on up into their pre-teen and teen years are suffering from some sort of depression or other mental illness. Undiagnosed and untreated - what does their future hold for them?
