Battling Bipolar Disorder Symptoms in Children

It must be a strange situation very parent to discover that their child is suffering from bipolar disorder symptoms. This is condition which affects over 4% of the adult population of the world. Is also a condition which is not fully recognized or diagnosed. In over 50% of the adult sufferers, the patient will report that they were suffering from the condition, or the signs and symptoms of the condition, before they reached their 18th birthday. This suggests that over 50% of sufferers are indeed children or teenagers.

But, if we were to believe the statistics then we would presume that bipolar disorder symptoms in children only affect 5% of the population. This goes against the above statistic. And there are many reasons for this. One of the main reasons of course is the misdiagnosis of the condition in general. People who go to the doctor for problems related to bipolar disorder symptoms are often misdiagnosed. Either they are misdiagnosed with having depression, or unipolar disorder, or the manic side of the condition is overlooked completely.

It’s not hard to see why this is so. If a person goes to the doctor that feeling ill, depressed, with pains, is perfectly acceptable. But it is very difficult to see how somebody will go to their doctor with the opposite side of those feelings, the feelings that they are on top of the world. This of course is the other side of bipolar disorder. So, this misdiagnosis is one side of the coin. The other side of the coin when trying to battle bipolar disorder symptoms in children is that parents will mistake disease symptoms and signs of this condition for the child just being a child. They will say that their child is just acting out like any other child will do. Or they will say that the teenager is going through a phase of rebelliousness for instance.