Citation

Carlson GA, Klein DN. J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry 2018; 59(7): 740-743.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/jcpp.12873

PMID

29924397

Abstract

The bipolar disorder diagnosis in prepubertal children became popular because it answered a clinical need to treat the explosive behavior component of irritability and the hope that antimanic strategies would be helpful. Poor definition of episodes resulted in mixing chronic and episodic irritability in samples of children with bipolar disorder. The subsequent dramatic increase in neuroleptic use is a testimony to the importance of the problem of irritability and our need to better understand it. Insofar as our use of the term irritability conflates proneness to anger with the subsequent aggressive response, it will again not be clear who is being studied. We need to uncouple the mood and behavior aspects of irritability for further study or we will have traded the imprecision of "bipolar" for the imprecision of irritability.

© 2018 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.

Language: en