Child and adolescent onset bipolar disorders often go undetected or misdiagnosed; it takes years for many people to get the correct diagnosis with the correct treatments. Often it’s misdiagnosed as depression, but it’s important to differentiate bipolar and unipolar depression because treatments are different – antidepressants taken without a mood stabilizer can trigger mania. Early detection may save a lot of trouble for the individual.

Although pieces of the genetic puzzle are coming together now, clinical tests are not in use yet. But there is a questionnaire available today that can assess adolescent offspring of people with bipolar, a high risk group. It’s called the GBI (General Behaviour Inventory). A study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders finds:

RESULTS: The scores on the Depression scale of the GBI for the offspring who later developed a bipolar or any mood disorder were significantly higher than for the offspring who did not develop a mood disorder across a 5-year interval. For the offspring with a unipolar mood disorder at the first measurement, the scores on the Depression scale were significantly higher for those who switched to bipolar disorder versus those who remained unipolar.

Another test called the K-SADS (Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia) was used to detect bipolar adolescents in a sampling of hospital psychiatric inpatients. Previously it was thought only 1% of young patients were bipolar; this study discovered 20%. This is much closer to the percentage of adult inpatients with bipolar disorders.

The K-SADS is available for download here. Please don’t self-diagnose, however – discuss the results with your doctor. The GBI is not currently available online, but your doctor can obtain a copy.

Read more about the K-SADS in an article at Medscape (free membership required to view), and read more about bipolar disorders in children and adolescents and how it differs from adults in this article from the Encyclopedia of Children’s Health.

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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 25 Jan 2006
    Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.