Last week, Balanced Mind Foundation chat volunteer Julie and I were invited to give a seminar on childhood-onset mental illnesses to a group of 70 Illinois Department of Children and Family Services adoption preservation workers.  We spent six hours describing symptoms from the parent's point of view, and what parents say are the behaviors their children exhibit that should trigger at least a discussion with a doctor about mood disorders in children.  Most of our audience was licensed clinical social workers with Masters degrees and years of experience. Several in our audience had been on the job for more than a decade. But nearly everyone there expressed that they had never heard or seen what it is like to parent a child with a mental illness.