Juvenile bipolar disorder first arose in tandem with stimulant and antidepressant treatment in children
First there was the ADHD explosion, and then came the news that childhood depression was rampant, and not long after that, in the late 1990s, juvenile bipolar disorder burst into public view. Newspapers and magazines ran features on this phenomenon, and once more psychiatry explained its appearance with a story of scientific discovery. “It has long been thought in the psychiatric community that children could not be given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder until the mid-to-late teens, and that mania in children was extremely rare,” wrote psychiatrist Demitri Papolos, in his bestselling book The Bipolar Child. “But scientists in the research vanguard are beginning to prove that the disorder can begin very early in life and that it is far more common than was previously supposed.” Genetic theories of medical or mental conditions can enable people or society to absolve themselves from responsibility
Yet the rise in the number of children and adolescents with this diagnosis was so astonishing—a fortyfold increase from 1995 to 2003—that Time, in an article titled “Young and Bipolar,” wondered if something else might be going on.
But then, slowly but surely, such case reports began to appear. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, psychiatrists began prescribing Ritalin to hyperactive children, and suddenly, in 1976, Washington University’s Warren Weinberg, a pediatric neurologist, was writing in the American Journal of Diseases of Childhood that it was time for the field to realize that children could go manic. “Acceptance of the concept that mania occurs in children is important in order that affected children can be identified, the natural history defined, and appropriate treatment established and offered to these children,” he wrote.
This was the moment in the medical literature that pediatric bipolar disorder was, in essence, “discovered.” In his article, Weinberg reviewed the case histories of five children suffering from this previously unrecognized illness, but he rushed past the fact that at least three of the five children had been treated with a tricyclic or Ritalin prior to becoming manic. Two years later, doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital announced that they had identified nine children with bipolar disorder, and they, too, skipped over the fact that seven of the nine had been previously treated with amphetamines, Ritalin, and other medications.
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2010). Anatomy of an Epidemic Chapter 11 The Epidemic Spreads to Children (Epub p. 319). New York , NY: Crown Publishing.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychiatry / Pharmacology / Biology / Neuroscience Status:☀️