Some psychiatrists had explained away the co-arising of juvenile bipolar and childhood stimulant and antidepressant treatment by claiming that the drugs revealed an underlying disorder rather than causing it
Juvenile bipolar disorder first arose in tandem with stimulant and antidepressant treatment in children. in 1982, Michael Strober and Gabrielle Carlson at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute put a new twist into the juvenile bipolar story. Twelve of the sixty adolescents they had treated with antidepressants had turned “bipolar” over the course of three years, which—one might think—suggested that the drugs had caused the mania. Instead, Strober and Carlson reasoned that their study had shown that antidepressants could be used as a diagnostic tool. It wasn’t that antidepressants were causing some children to go manic, but rather the drugs were unmasking bipolar disorder that they already had, as only children with the disease would suffer this reaction to an antidepressant. “Our data imply that biologic differences between latent depressive subtypes are already present and detectable during the period of early adolescence, and that pharmacologic challenge can serve as one reliable aid in delimiting specific affective syndromes in juveniles,” they said. Genetic theories of medical or mental conditions can enable people or society to absolve themselves from responsibility, and in by blaming genetics, pharma was able to get off the hook.
The “unmasking” of bipolar disorder in children soon speed up. The prescribing of Ritalin and antidepressants to children took off in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and as this occurred, the bipolar epidemic erupted. The number of hostile, aggressive, and out-of-control children admitted to psychiatric wards soared, and in 1995 Peter Lewinsohn from the Oregon Research Institute concluded that 1 percent of all American adolescents were now bipolar. Three years later, Carlson reported that 63 percent of the pediatric patients treated at her university hospital suffered from mania, the very symptom that doctors in the pre-psychopharmacologic era almost never saw in children. “Manic symptoms are the rule, rather than the exception,” she noted. The number of children discharged from hospitals with a bipolar diagnosis rose fivefold between 1996 and 2004, such that this “ferocious mental illness” was now said to strike one in every fifty prepubertal children in America. “We don’t have the exact numbers yet,” University of Texas psychiatrist Robert Hirschfeld told Time in 2002, “except we know it’s there, and it’s underdiagnosed.”
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2010). Anatomy of an Epidemic Chapter 11 The Epidemic Spreads to Children (Epub p. 321). New York , NY: Crown Publishing.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychiatry / Pharmacology Status:☀️