Stuart Kaplan: Your Child Does Not Have Bipolar Disorder

Your Child Does Not Have Bipolar Disorder: How Bad Science and Good Public Relations Created the Diagnosis (Childhood in America)

Book Description:

"From roughly 1994 to 2003, the diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder in children and adolescents underwent a dramatic, unwarranted increase. In 1995 there were 20,000 outpatient visits for this diagnosis in childhood; by 2003 the number was 800,000. Now, nearly one third of all children and adolescents discharged from psychiatric hospitals have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder."

Excerpt from Newsweek article by Dr. Stuart Kaplan author of Your Child Does Not Have Bipolar Disorder

Mommy am I really Bipolar?

"I have been a child psychiatrist for nearly five decades and have seen diagnostic fads come and go. But I have never witnessed anything like the tidal wave of unwarranted enthusiasm for the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children that now engulfs the public and the profession. Before 1995, bipolar disorder, once known as manic-depressive illness, was rarely diagnosed in children; today nearly one third of all children and adolescents discharged from child psychiatric hospitals are diagnosed with the disorder and medicated accordingly. The rise of outpatient office visits for children and adolescents with bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 20,000 in 1994–95 to 800,000 in 2002–03. A Harvard child-psychiatry group led by Dr. Joseph Biederman, a prominent supporter of the diagnosis, recently insisted, “Juvenile bipolar disorder is a serious illness that is estimated to affect approximately 1 percent to 4 percent of children."

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Thank you Dr. Kaplan, for telling the story of one similar to my daughter's, misdiagnosed at age 11 in 1999 with Childhood Bipolar Disorder, and over-medicated and now disabled and cognitively impaired as a young adult residing in a rehabilitative facility with my hope of someday being able to speak again and tell everyone else what happened to her.

She's a victim of this atrocity. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ Pharma and the pediatric bipolar diagnosis lockstep....