Study Reveals Today's Youths Are More Likely to Have Bipolar Disorder

According to a new study published in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, youths today are more likely to have bipolar disorder than they were in the past. In fact, the study found that youths are forty times more likely to have bipolar disorder than they were just ten years ago. That is a huge growth, significantly more than that of adults over the same time period. Why is this happening?

Bipolar disorder is a psychiatric condition. In the past, the same criteria for diagnosing bipolar disorder in adults was also used to diagnose the disorder in children. However, within the last twenty years experts have realized that bipolar disorder in children varies from that in adults. Sometimes it can vary greatly. Children with bipolar disorder often alternate between mania (an extremely elevated mood marked by unusual thought patterns and extreme energy) and depression (an intense state of sadness marked unusual thought patterns, low energy, and frequent crying). While many children alternate between the two extremes, others tend to alternate less frequently and stay more towards one end of the spectrum, particularly depression. Sometimes, children with bipolar disorder have no symptoms other than intense irritability. Youths whose parents have a history of the disease, other mental illnesses, or drug and/or alcohol abuse are more likely to get bipolar disorder.

In the study, researchers looked at data on youths up to age nineteen with bipolar disorder collected by the National Center for Health Statistics collected over a ten-year period. Researchers found that not only is the number of childhood bipolar disorder increasing, but it is increasing at an alarming rate. The number of youths with bipolar disorder went from 20,000 in 1994 to 800,000 in 2003. Experts would expect that since the number of youths with bipolar disorder is increasing, so should the number of adults with the disease. However, that is not the case. In fact, the growth of children and teens with bipolar disorder increased at a rate twenty times faster than that of adults during the same ten-year period.