Between 1994 and 2003, the rate of outpatient visits for juvenile bipolar disorder rose a staggering forty-fold. Meanwhile, the experts continued to maintain that treating children with antidepressants and stimulants was not causing bipolar disorder, but was merely revealing a pre-existing condition. A 2004 paper in the Journal of Affective Disorders suggested "In children genetically determined to develop bipolar disorder, the use of antidepressants and stimulants may advance the onset of bipolar disorder even before puberty."
If all these drugs were doing was advancing the date of onset of bipolar disorder, that would be bad enough, but in fact, the proportion of both children and adults disabled by bipolar disorder has skyrocketed since the beginning of the modern psychopharmaceutical era. In his 2010 blockbuster work of non-fiction Anatomy of an Epidemic, author Robert Whitaker breaks it down. In 1955, the number of patients in the United States hospitalized for all affective disorders was 50,000. An estimated one out of four, or about 12,500, suffered from bipolar disorder. Today, some six million adults suffer from this disorder, and 83% of these are 'severely impaired" in one or more aspects of their lives. A condition that affected perhaps of 100 people out of one million now afflicts something like 40,000 per million.
