Facts & Fictions in Mental Health: Do Kids Get Bipolar Disorder?; July / August 2012; Scientific American Mind; by HAL ARKOWITZ AND SCOTT O. LILIENFELD; 2 Page(s)

Imagine an eight-year-old boy whom we will call Eric. He is irritable and talks incessantly. Unable to sit still and concentrate, he does poorly at school. Nevertheless, he claims to be one of the smartest kids in the world and blames his poor academic performance on his "horrible" teachers. There are periods when his mood changes abruptly from euphoria to depression and then swings back again. Eric's symptoms qualify him for a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which is characterized by episodes of full-blown mania or a less severe form called hypomania. These moods usually alternate with periods of depression [see box on opposite page].

Until about 1980 most mental health professionals believed that bipolar disorder did not occur in children. Although a few still hold this view, the general opinion of the psychiatric community has drastically shifted over the past 30 years, a period in which diagnoses of the disorder in kids have skyrocketed. In a study published in 2007 psychiatrist Carmen Moreno, then at Gregorio Marañén University General Hospital in Madrid, and her colleagues found a 40-fold increase between 1994 and 2003 in the number of visits to a psychiatrist in which a patient younger than 19 was given this diagnosis. By 2003, the researchers reported, the number of office visits resulting in a bipolar diagnosis in these youths had risen from 25 per 100,000 people to 1,003 per 100,000 people, a rate almost as high as that for adults.