Biopolar diagnosis in USA and Germany


Factoid Answer

Compared with a teenager in Germany, a teenager in the United States is about how likely to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder?

  • About forty times as likely

See Martin Holtmann and colleagues, “Bipolar disorder in children and adolescents in Germany: national trends in the rates of inpatients, 2000 – 2007,” Bipolar Disorders, volume 12, pp. 155 – 163, 2010, full text available online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1399-5618.2010.00794.x/full. Among adolescents, Holtmann and colleagues note that an adolescent in the United States is still much more likely (about 40 times more likely) to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder than an adolescent in Germany (204 / 5.22 = 39.1, p. 159).

For more context on this point, please see chapter 3 of my book The Collapse of Parenting: Why most kids today would be better off raised outside the United States // What you need to know, and the three things you must do, if you’re staying here (to be published later this year by Basic Books). Or you could attend my presentation titled “The Medicalization of Misbehavior

 

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