- Anna
Salleh
- ABC Science
Online
- Friday, 21
April 2006
Children as young
as two years old are being inappropriately
diagnosed and medicated for bipolar disorder,
says a UK psychiatrist.
Professor David
Healy of Cardiff University told the Inaugural
Conference on Disease-Mongering recently in
Newcastle, Australia, that increasing numbers of
children are being treated for the condition
with drugs that carry serious side-effects,
without evidence the condition exists in that
age group.
....
He says American
Psychiatric Association (APA) diagnostic
guidelines specify that periods of highs and
lows should last for weeks at a time at
least.
But he says
children being diagnosed as having bipolar
disorder have moods that go up and down during
the course of a day.
"Every kid's mood
goes up and down during the course of the day,"
he says.
Healy says
advocates of using the diagnosis on children say
the APA guidelines should be changed.
"The response from
most of the rest of the world is that the
Americans have gone hysterical."
Expanding
treatment
Healy believes
that the diagnosis of children with bipolar
disorder is part of a general trend towards
increasing the number of people treated with
mood stabilisers, which he says have risks that
are downplayed and benefits that are
overplayed.
He says while a
very small percentage of people have the serious
form of bipolar disorder that might warrant
medication, recently people with relatively mild
mood swings have been treated, and this is now
including children.
Healy says this
spread of diagnosis is reflected in the
increasing number of books on bipolar disorder
aimed at clinicians, parents and
children.
What he describes
as a "watershed" book called The Bipolar Child:
The Definitive and Reassuring Guide to
Childhood's Most Misunderstood Disorder sold
70,000 hardback copies in its first six months,
indicating huge support for the diagnosis, he
says.
....
Chairperson of the
Royal Australian and New Zealand College of
Psychiatrists' Faculty of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry, Dr Phill Brock, is also concerned
about children being inappropriately diagnosed
with bipolar.
"We do not endorse
that diagnosis in children," he says.
Brock runs the
inpatient service of the Women's and Children's
Hospital in Adelaide and says he is aware the
diagnosis is being made, both by GPs and
psychiatrists.
"We would contend
that because of the developmental context we're
not able to say categorically that this is an
illness that can be applied to
children."
He says he is
aware of advocates for diagnosing bipolar in
children and found it alarming when a US
organisation approached the faculty he
represents 18 months ago to set up a support
group for infants and children with bipolar
disorder.
Healy says while a
child might be hard to handle because they've
moved house or school, because they've been
bullied at day-care or because their parents
aren't getting on it is "easier to locate to the
problem in the child".
Brock is similarly
concerned.
"We know that
children and teenagers frequently have changes
in mood. That's part of growing up," he
says.
