Word: bipolarity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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While emotional turmoil is part of being a teenager, Nicole Cabezas is among a growing cohort of kids whose unsteady psyches do not simply rise and fall now and then but whipsaw violently from one extreme to another. Bipolar disorder--once known as manic depression, always known as a ferocious mental illness--seems to be showing up in children at an increasing rate, and that has taken a lot of mental-health professionals by surprise. The illness until recently was thought of as the rare province of luckless adults--the overachieving businessman given to sullen lows and impulsive highs...
...bipolar disorder isn't nearly so selective. As doctors look deeper into the condition and begin to understand its underlying causes, they are coming to the unsettling conclusion that large numbers of teens and children are suffering from it as well. The National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association gathered in Orlando, Fla., last week for its annual meeting, as doctors and therapists face a daunting task. Although the official tally of Americans suffering from bipolar disorder seems to be holding steady--at about 2.3 million, striking men and women equally--the average age of onset has fallen in a single...
...that number doesn't include kids under 18. Diagnosing the condition at very young ages is new and controversial, but experts estimate that an additional 1 million preteens and children in the U.S. may suffer from the early stages of bipolar disorder. Moreover, when adult bipolars are interviewed, nearly half report that their first manic episode occurred before age 21; 1 in 5 says it occurred in childhood. "We don't have the exact numbers yet," says Dr. Robert Hirschfeld, head of the psychiatry department at the University of Texas in Galveston, "except we know it's there...
...right, it's an important warning sign for parents and doctors, since bipolar disorder is not an illness that can be allowed to go untreated. Victims have an alcoholism and drug-abuse rate triple that of the rest of the population and a suicide rate that may approach 20%. They often suffer for a decade before their condition is diagnosed, and for years more before it is properly treated. "If you don't catch it early on," says Dr. Demitri Papolos, research director of the Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation and co-author of The Bipolar Child (Broadway Books...
Determining why the age-of-onset figures are in free fall is attracting a lot of research attention. Some experts believe that kids are being tipped into bipolar disorder by family and school stress, recreational-drug use and perhaps even a collection of genes that express themselves more aggressively in each generation. Others argue that the actual number of sick kids hasn't changed at all; instead, we've just got better at diagnosing the illness. If that's the case, it's still significant, because it means that those children have gone for years without receiving treatment for their...