In the cover story of the NY Times Magazine Sept. 14. writer Jennifer Egan profiles a family whose son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder age 8.She writes that the 10-year-old, James, has "main symptoms of aggression and explosive rage (known in clinical parlance as 'irritability'), and those traits have been visible in James from the time he was a toddler. Fifteen years ago his condition would probably not have been called bipolar disorder, and some doctors might hesitate to diagnose it in him even now, preferring other labels that more directly address James’s rage and aggression: Oppositional Defiant Disorder (O.D.D.) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (A.D.H.D.) — both of which have been applied to James as well. But since the mid-1990s, a revolution has occurred in the field of child psychiatry, and a mental illness characterized by episodes of mania and depression (bipolar disorder used to be called 'manic depression'), which once was believed not to exist before late adolescence, is now being ascribed rather freely to children with mood problems, sometimes at very young ages."
