4,000 Percent Increase in Pediatric Bipolar Disorder – Sobering Statistic or Sensational Twist?

This week a headline snagged my attention in Google news proclaiming Bipolar Disorder Increases 4,000 Percent in Children and Adolescents.

The article is Lynette Fleming's review of the book The Way of Boys: Raising Healthy Boys in a Challenging and Complex World by Anthony Rao and Michelle Seaton. The basic premise of the book is that "as a culture, we are increasingly failing to respect young boyhood, pathologizing normal boy behavior and foisting burdensome and stigmatizing diagnoses of ADHD, Asperger's syndrome, bipolar disorder, and more on boys as young as three years old."

I haven't read the book, though it is now on my list, so I can't make any comment about its veracity or if it includes this specific statistic. 4,000 percent? Really? Is this figure accurate or a sensational twist to grad attention? It sure did catch mine. This figure is significantly higher than the figures I've seen in published research.

As I shared in Childhood Onset Bipolar Disorder - Beyond Obscurity, Brady Case and Anthony Russo, researchers at New York University, reported that the number of children under 18 who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder increased fourfold between 1999 and 2000. Another report shows up to a 600 percent increase in children under the age of 13 diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the past 10 years.

Whether the figure is fourfold, 600 percent or 4,000 percent, bipolar disorder is being diagnosed with significantly more frequency in children. However, these numbers are painting a colorless, two-dimensional perspective on the reality of childhood onset bipolar disorder. The increases are in number of diagnoses and probably not in actual cases. It has only been in the last decade or so that the medical community began to recognize that bipolar disorder did develop in children. Prior to that, children experiencing these problems received other diagnoses such as attention deficit disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, etc.

So are there more kids are who sick now then there were ten years ago? There really isn't data to support an answer to this question, which I believe is the point the authors of The Way of Boys is trying to make. Focus on the individual child and the child's needs.

After posting this blog, I forwarded it to Dr. Anthony Rao. I asked him about source of the referenced statistics and about his input regarding the goals of the book. Here is his response. ~Kimberly

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Learn more or join the conversation!
_{NEWSLETTER | FORUM | BIO | TWITTER}
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .