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You say, "But how do u compete with the teacher that in her eyes knows everything."
The answer is that you are the Mom, and the truth is that in a child's eyes Mom may not know everything, but she means everything.
My Mum was bipolar (or schizophrenic, they never quite sorted out the diagnoses) and I figured it out fairly early, though she never straight out said what was wrong. I don't think she even knew, back in the seventies and eighties. But even though I knew she was flat out bonkers a lot of the time, even though her manic states were terrifying, and incomprehensible, and her depressive states almost unbearable to deal with, I still knew she loved me, and I knew that of all people on the planet she was the one who had my back.
Don't worry that your daughter will choose her teacher over you. You are her Mother. There's only one of you in the whole world, and it's hard wired into her, socially, genetically, emotionally, to love and honour you... even if she's doing the teenage daughter thing of slamming her door and saying "you don't understand me."
I did all that with my Mum, but we still loved each other, and I still respected her opinion above that of anyone else in the world.
Recently I've been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, and after something like twenty years of misdiagnoses, partly because I was too frightened to tell the truth, it was a huge relief to find out what was wrong and get the treatment I needed. I thought hard about what to tell my son, and in the end told him the truth, since I know he's had to put up with me all his life. He was one hundred percent fine about it. He's noticed that the media misrepresents mental illness, and he gets cross with the telly, not me.
My advice is this... your daughter already knows on some level, and wants to find out more... that's why she chose this topic, even if she's not aware of it herself. She wants to understand you better. She loves you.
Her teacher is a prize imbecile to make the comments she did. I would write a letter to the school objecting to the comments this teacher made, and simply say that they are hurtful since a family member has been affected by these issues. They don't have to know it's you. My son's school don't know what's wrong with me. (They probably suspect depression.) The point is, your daughter is your child, not the teacher's, and she will want to hear from you... and believe me, she'll trust you.
I loved my mother, and my son loves me. The fact that she was ill, and I am ill hasn't destroyed that mother child bond, and I'm sure it won't destroy your either.
Good luck.
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