Bipolar: The Manufactured Epidemic

An Essay on the Diagnosis That Drugs Built

Yale University researchers reviewed the records of 87,290 patients diagnosed with depression or anxiety between 1997 and 2001. Those treated with antidepressants converted to bipolar illness at the rate of 7.7 percent per year — three times the rate for those not exposed to the drugs.¹ Over longer periods, 20 to 40 percent of all patients initially diagnosed with unipolar depression eventually convert to bipolar.² In a survey of the Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association, 60 percent of those carrying a bipolar diagnosis said they had initially been depressed and turned bipolar after exposure to an antidepressant.³

These numbers were published in mainstream psychiatric journals by researchers working within the system. They describe a process that routinely manufactures bipolar patients out of depressed ones. The antidepressant creates the mania. The mania earns the diagnosis. The diagnosis generates a drug cocktail. The cocktail produces outcomes worse than the original illness ever did untreated.

In 1955, approximately 12,750 people were hospitalised with bipolar illness in the United States — a disability rate of roughly one in every 13,000 people.⁴ The NIMH now counts nearly six million adults with the diagnosis.⁵ According to researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, 83 percent of them are “severely impaired” in some facet of their lives.⁵

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Before the Drugs

Medical texts dating back to Hippocrates contain descriptions of patients alternating between mania and melancholia. The condition was uncommon but recognisable. When Emil Kraepelin sorted psychotic disorders into categories in his 1899 diagnostic texts, he placed these patients in his manic-depressive group. What distinguished them from dementia praecox patients was that they recovered between episodes. Their minds remained intact.⁶

George Winokur, at Washington University in St. Louis, reviewed the pre-drug literature on the bipolar subset in the late 1960s. Horatio Pollock reported in 1931 that 50 percent of patients admitted for a first attack of mania never suffered a second attack, and only 20 percent experienced three or more episodes.⁷ F. I. Wertham, at Johns Hopkins, found that 80 percent of the manic group recovered within a year and fewer than one percent required long-term hospitalisation.⁸ Gunnar Lundquist’s study found 85 percent “socially recovered” and resuming their former positions.⁹ Ming Tsuang, at the University of Iowa, followed eighty-six manic patients admitted between 1935 and 1944 for thirty years. Nearly 70 percent had good outcomes — married, working, living in their own homes. Half were completely asymptomatic.¹⁰

Winokur’s conclusion: there “was no basis to consider that manic depressive psychosis permanently affected those who suffered from it.”¹¹ Episodes were usually a few months in duration. Many patients experienced only one episode in a lifetime. Between episodes, they had “no difficulty resuming their usual occupations.”¹¹

This was the condition before the drugs arrived. Time-limited episodes. Full recovery between them. No cognitive impairment. Eighty-five percent returning to work.

The Antidepressant Gateway

The first report of antidepressant-induced mania appeared in 1956, when George Crane documented psychiatric side effects of iproniazid.¹² The reports continued. In 1985, Swiss investigators tracking changes in the patient mix at Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich reported that after the introduction of antidepressants, the percentage with manic symptoms jumped dramatically. “Bipolar disorders increased; more patients were admitted with frequent episodes,” they wrote.¹³

In 1993, the APA’s own practice guide for depression conceded that “all anti-depressant treatments, including ECT, may provoke manic or hypomanic episodes.”¹⁴

The Yale data from 2004 quantified the conversion rate: 7.7 percent per year, three times the rate for unexposed patients.¹ Fred Goodwin, co-author of the field’s standard textbook Manic-Depressive Illness, described the mechanism in a 2005 interview: “If you create iatrogenically a bipolar patient, that patient is likely to have recurrences of bipolar illness even if the offending antidepressant is discontinued. The evidence shows that once a patient has had a manic episode, he or she is more likely to have another one, even without the antidepressant stimulation.”¹⁵

Giovanni Fava, in Italy, confirmed: “Antidepressant-induced mania is not simply a temporary and fully reversible phenomenon, but may trigger complex biochemical mechanisms of illness deterioration.”¹⁶

As early as 1965 — before lithium had entered American psychiatry — German psychiatrists were already documenting the transformation. Patients treated with antidepressants were relapsing more frequently, the drugs “transforming the illness from an episodic course with free intervals to a chronic course with continuous illness.”¹⁷ In 1983, Athanasios Koukopoulos, director of a mood disorders clinic in Rome, reported the same change in Italian patients. Rapid cycling, unknown before the drug era, now afflicted 16 percent of his manic-depressive patients. They were suffering 6.5 mood episodes annually, up from less than one before antidepressant treatment.¹⁸

The drugs were destroying the asymptomatic intervals — the very feature that had made manic-depressive illness survivable.

The Children’s Doorway

The stimulant pathway into bipolar was quantified by Joseph Biederman’s own research group at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1996, they reported that 15 of 140 children diagnosed with ADHD developed bipolar symptoms — symptoms not present at initial diagnosis — within four years.¹⁹ Eleven percent. Prescribe stimulants to 3.5 million children and adolescents, as the United States does, and this practice will create approximately 400,000 bipolar youth.

Stimulants cycle children through arousal and dysphoric states on a daily basis. When the drug is active, dopamine levels rise: the child becomes energised, hyperalert, anxious, irritable, aggressive, unable to sleep. When the drug exits the brain, dopamine levels crash: fatigue, lethargy, apathy, social withdrawal, depression.²⁰ These arousal and dysphoric symptoms are the very symptoms the NIMH identifies as characteristic of childhood bipolar illness. Every child on a stimulant turns a bit bipolar.

The antidepressant pathway runs parallel. University of Pittsburgh researchers reported in 1992 that 23 percent of boys aged eight to nineteen treated with Prozac developed mania or manic-like symptoms, with another 19 percent developing “drug-induced” hostility.²¹ In Eli Lilly’s own first study of Prozac for pediatric depression, 6 percent of children on the drug suffered a manic episode; none in the placebo group did.²² Yale researchers found in 2004 that the risk of antidepressant-induced mania was highest in those under thirteen years of age.²³

Harvard psychiatrists determined in 1995 that 25 percent of children and adolescents diagnosed with depression convert to bipolar within two to four years on antidepressants.²⁴ Barbara Geller at Washington University extended the follow-up to ten years. Nearly half of prepubertal children treated for depression ended up bipolar.²⁵

In a 2003 study, Rif El-Mallakh at the University of Louisville found that 62 percent of seventy-nine juvenile bipolar patients had been treated with a stimulant or an antidepressant before their first manic episode.²⁶ Demitri Papolos reported that 83 percent of 195 bipolar children had been diagnosed with another psychiatric illness first, and two-thirds had been exposed to an antidepressant.²⁷ Gianni Faedda found that 84 percent of children treated for bipolar illness at the Luci Bini Mood Disorders Clinic in New York between 1998 and 2000 had been previously exposed to psychiatric drugs. “Strikingly, in fewer than 10% of the cases was diagnosis of bipolar disorder considered initially,” he wrote.²⁸

The parents saw it happen. Martha Hellander of the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation and Tomie Burke of Parents of Bipolar Children wrote jointly to the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 1999: “Most of our children initially received the ADHD diagnosis, were given stimulants and or antidepressants, and either did not respond or suffered symptoms of mania such as rages, insomnia, agitation, pressured speech, and the like.... First hospitalization occurred often among our children during manic or mixed states triggered or exacerbated by treatment with stimulants, tricyclics, or serotonin reuptake inhibitors.”²⁹

The Biederman Architecture

Prior to the 1990s, psychiatry considered bipolar illness in prepubertal children either nonexistent or extremely rare. The DSM required episodic mania for the diagnosis — a distinct period of abnormally elevated or expansive mood lasting at least one week. Biederman’s difficult patients were not episodically manic. They were chronically irritable. As Gary Greenberg documents in The Book of Woe, Biederman’s solution was to redefine chronic irritability as the childhood form of episodic mania.³⁰

His colleagues objected. Epidemiological research by investigators outside his group had found zero children with mania. The remaining distinguishing symptoms — grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, flight of ideas, excessive involvement in pleasurable activities — amounted to a working definition of exuberant childhood. Longitudinal studies showed that difficult ADHD children went on to develop various problems, but bipolar was not among them.³¹

Biederman compared his critics to flat-earthers. He likened his own discovery to Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine — “suggestive comparisons,” Greenberg notes, “for a man studying a disorder with grandiosity among its symptoms.”³¹

The DSM provided Biederman his loophole. In addition to the formal bipolar categories, it includes “Bipolar Disorder Not Otherwise Specified” — BDNOS — designed for cases with “bipolar features that do not meet criteria for any specific Bipolar Disorder.”³² If the patient doesn’t qualify for the diagnosis, the clinician can give it anyway.

Biederman acknowledged his method during a 2009 legal deposition. All psychiatric diagnoses, he testified, “are subjective in children and in adults.” He and his colleagues had decided that children previously labelled with conduct disorder or oppositional-defiant disorder should be diagnosed with juvenile bipolar illness instead. “The conditions that we see in front of us are reconceptualized,” he explained. “These children have been called in the past conduct disorder, oppositional-defiant disorder. It’s not that these children did not exist, they were just under different names.”³³

Senator Charles Grassley’s 2008 investigation documented the financial architecture. Biederman received $1.6 million from pharmaceutical companies between 2000 and 2007, much of it from Janssen, the Johnson & Johnson division that sells Risperdal.³⁴ He secured $2 million from J&J to create the Johnson & Johnson Center for Pediatric Psychopathology at Mass General. In a 2002 internal report, Biederman stated its purpose: a “strategic collaboration” to “move forward the commercial goals of J&J.” The center would develop screening tests for juvenile bipolar illness, train physicians to use them, and promote the understanding that “pediatric mania evolves into what some have called mixed or atypical mania in adulthood,” providing “further support for the chronic use of Risperdal from childhood through adulthood.”³⁴

Peter Gøtzsche notes that psychiatrist James Deutsch asked Biederman at a 1998 conference what proportion of his “bipolar” children had histories of trauma. Biederman answered without hesitation: “None.”³⁵

The diagnosis rose 35-fold in seventeen years in the United States.³⁵ American doctors diagnose bipolar in children 100 times more often than British doctors — a disparity that Gøtzsche treats as evidence the diagnosis is, in nearly all cases, an artefact of prescribing practices.³⁵

By 2007, half a million children — twenty thousand of them under six — were prescribed antipsychotic drugs that a decade earlier would have been reserved for the most extreme circumstances.³⁶

The Expanding Label

The adult diagnostic boundaries expanded in parallel.

When bipolar disorder was first separated from manic-depressive illness, the diagnosis required hospitalisation for both mania and depression. In 1976, NIMH researchers introduced bipolar II: hospitalised for depression but only hypomanic episodes. Then bipolar II expanded to include people never hospitalised for either condition. In the 1990s, the hypomania threshold dropped from four days to two days. In 2003, former NIMH director Lewis Judd proposed “bipolar spectrum disorder” for “subthreshold” symptoms.³⁷

There was now bipolar I, bipolar II, and what one expert called “a bipolarity intermediate between bipolar disorder and normality.”³⁸ Judd calculated that 6.4 percent of American adults suffered from bipolar symptoms. Others argued one in four adults fell into the catchall bin.³⁷

The self-validating logic is complete. Once a diagnostic category exists, the fact that people fit into it becomes evidence that the disorder exists.³¹ The name creates its own reality. I have written elsewhere about this mechanism — how naming converts a living process into a billable entity, imports a prognosis, and forecloses the investigation into actual causes.³⁹ ⁴⁰ The bipolar diagnosis is a case study in all three.

“I have bipolar disorder” is a statement of identity. “I am experiencing intense emotional fluctuations” is a description of something that is happening. The first closes investigation. The second opens it. The first says: this is what you are, permanently, and it requires lifelong pharmaceutical management. The second says: something is producing this response, and that something can be identified.

Lithium and the Withdrawal Trap

Lithium, the original “mood stabiliser,” arrived in American psychiatry in the early 1970s, touted as a specific treatment for the newly separated bipolar diagnosis. Only four placebo-controlled trials of any merit were ever conducted.⁴¹

Lithium created its own trap. Ross Baldessarini reported in 1999 that half of all patients relapsed within five months of stopping lithium, even though without prior lithium exposure, the natural relapse rate was nearly three years. The time between episodes following lithium withdrawal was seven times shorter than the natural course of the illness.⁴²

Jonathan Himmelhoch at the University of Pittsburgh described the mechanism: “Manic relapse is readily triggered by lithium withdrawal, probably by the release of supersensitized receptors or membrane pathways.”⁴³ Joanna Moncrieff drew the conclusion: patients who took lithium and then stopped ended up “worse than if they had never had any drug treatment.”⁴⁴ Guy Goodwin, a Scottish psychiatrist, concluded in 1993 that the higher hospitalisation readmission rates since lithium’s introduction “could be explained entirely” by this drug-induced worsening.⁴⁵

Lewis Judd’s NIMH research on normal volunteers documented what lithium does to the mind. The studies showed a “general dulling and blunting of various personality functions” and overall slowing of cognitive processes. The volunteers’ partners noticed increased drowsiness and reduced ability to think clearly. Trained mental health professionals observing the same subjects detected no behavioural changes — a finding Peter Breggin treats as evidence that clinicians are trained not to notice the damage their treatments cause.⁴⁶

Breggin also cites William Dyson and Myer Mendelson’s 1968 description of lithium’s action in the American Journal of Psychiatry: “It is as if their ‘intensity of living’ dial had been turned down a few notches. Things do not seem so very important or imperative; there is a greater acceptance of everyday life as it is rather than as one might want it to be.”⁴⁶

Roughly 40 percent of patients relapsed within two years even while remaining on lithium. Perhaps 20 percent were genuine long-term responders. For the majority, the drug provided little lasting relief.⁴⁷ By the late 1990s, lithium had lost its place as first-line therapy to the “mood stabilisers” — a marketing term that rebranded antipsychotics and anticonvulsants.

The Before-and-After

Baldessarini detailed the transformation in a 2007 review article.⁴⁸

Before the drug era: prevalence of roughly one in 5,000 to 20,000 people. Good long-term functional outcomes in 75 to 90 percent. Time-limited acute episodes with recovery to euthymia (no symptoms) and favourable functional adaptation between episodes. No cognitive impairment between episodes or long term.

The modern era: prevalence of one in 20 to 50. Good long-term functional outcomes in 33 percent. Slow or incomplete recovery from acute episodes, continued risk of recurrences, and sustained morbidity over time. Cognitive impairment even between episodes, with long-term impairment across multiple cognitive domains similar to what is observed in medicated schizophrenia.

David Kupfer at the University of Pittsburgh studied 2,839 bipolar patients and found two-thirds unemployed, despite 60 percent having attended college and 30 percent having graduated.⁴⁹ Michael Gitlin at UCLA reported only 28 percent with good occupational outcomes at five years.⁵⁰ Lewis Judd found bipolar II patients depressed 50 percent of the time. “The nature of this deceptively ‘milder’ form of manic-depressive illness is so chronic as to seem to fill the entire life,” he wrote.⁵¹ Robert Post found nearly two-thirds of 258 bipolar patients suffering four or more episodes per year.⁵²

Baldessarini summarised: “Prognosis for bipolar disorder was once considered relatively favorable, but contemporary findings suggest that disability and poor outcomes are prevalent, despite major therapeutic advances.”⁴⁸

The word despite does the heavy lifting in that sentence. It preserves the assumption that the treatments advanced something. The data shows what they advanced was disability.

The Convergence

Kraepelin’s entire diagnostic system rested on distinguishing manic-depressive illness from schizophrenia. Schizophrenia patients deteriorated cognitively over time. Manic-depressive patients did not. This was the defining difference.

Studies conducted before 1975 found no consistent cognitive deficits in bipolar patients.⁵³ But once lithium was introduced, researchers began noting cognitive slowing. When lithium monotherapy gave way to drug cocktails — typically an antidepressant, an antipsychotic, a mood stabiliser, a benzodiazepine, sometimes a stimulant — the cognitive damage accelerated.

In 2001, Faith Dickerson at the Sheppard Pratt Health System tested seventy-four medicated schizophrenia patients and twenty-six medicated bipolar patients across forty-one cognitive and social-functioning variables. The bipolar patients were as impaired as the schizophrenia patients on thirty-six of the forty-one measures.⁵⁴ The same convergence showed up in data from Australia, England, Sweden, Germany, and Spain. The Australians found that even mildly symptomatic bipolar patients were “neuropsychologically scarred.”⁵⁵ The Spanish investigators observed that “the more medications the patients received, the greater the psychosocial functioning impairment.”⁵⁶

The two groups that had been diagnostically born as distinct — precisely because their cognitive trajectories differed — were now producing indistinguishable outcomes. Stephen Stahl, author of Antipsychotics and Mood Stabilizers, noted the reason in 2005: “The field is witnessing a convergence of pharmacological approaches to the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.” The same drug cocktails were being prescribed for both conditions.⁵⁷ Same cocktails, same brain disruption, same outcomes. Polypharmacy psychiatric drug illness, wearing two different diagnostic labels.

Martin Harrow’s fifteen-year NIMH-funded study completed the picture. He followed manic-depressive patients on and off medications alongside schizophrenia patients on and off medications. The long-term outcomes, from best to worst: manic-depressive off drugs, schizophrenia off drugs, manic-depressive on drugs, schizophrenia on drugs.⁵⁸

Medicated manic-depressive patients fared worse than unmedicated schizophrenia patients. The treatment for what had been the more benign condition produced worse outcomes than no treatment at all for the more severe one.

The Confessional

At the 2008 American Psychiatric Association meeting, the field’s own authorities said out loud what the data had been showing for decades. The session was titled “Antidepressants in Bipolar Disorder,” and it was led by the top bipolar experts in the country, including Goodwin and Robert Post.⁵⁹

Goodwin opened: “The illness has been altered. Today we have a lot more rapid cycling than we described in the first edition [of Manic-Depressive Illness], a lot more mixed states, a lot more lithium resistance, and a lot more lithium treatment failure. The illness is not what Kraepelin described anymore, and the biggest factor, I think, is that most patients who have the illness get an antidepressant before they ever get exposed to a mood stabilizer.”⁵⁹

Post followed: “The number of episodes, and it’s a very rich literature documenting this, is associated with more cognitive deficits. We are building more episodes, more treatment resistance, more cognitive dysfunction, and there is data showing that if you have four depressive episodes, unipolar or bipolar, it doubles your late-life risk of dementia. And guess what? That isn’t even the half of it.... In the United States, people with depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia are losing twelve to twenty years in life expectancy compared to people not in the mental health system.”⁵⁹

Nassir Ghaemi, from Tufts Medical Center, asked the audience whether fifty thousand psychiatrists could be wrong about antidepressants in bipolar disorder. “I think that the answer is yes, probably.”⁵⁹

Several audience members booed him.

The Name as Product

A teenager goes to see a therapist in Denver because she cries too much. She has no history of mania. She is prescribed an antidepressant, develops insomnia, and shows up agitated at her therapist’s office during finals week. She receives a new diagnosis: bipolar disorder. She is told it is chronic, that her episodes will increase in frequency, and that she will need drugs for the rest of her life.⁶⁰

A woman breaks down at college after being prescribed desipramine. She goes manic within six weeks. She spends the next twenty years cycling through hospitals, put on eight or nine different antidepressants, none of which work. Then she casually stops the antidepressant. On lithium alone, the suicidal feelings disappear. So do the depression and mania. Looking back, she is stunned: “I have not yet recovered from the immensity of the likelihood that my roulette game with antidepressants exacerbated my illness.”⁶¹

The distress was real. The crying was real. The naming system converted it into a product. “I am bipolar” replaced “I am struggling.” The first is permanent, biological, requires lifelong pharmaceutical management. The second is situational, human, invites the question why.

The teenager — Dorea Vierling-Clausen — eventually weaned herself off every drug. She went through withdrawal that included panic attacks, paranoia, and tremors. She questioned her diagnosis. She had first seen a therapist because she cried too much. There had been no mania before the antidepressant. “I had always thought before that I was one of those cases where the illness was clearly biological,” she recalled. “But then I thought, well, I came out as a lesbian, and I had no family support. Duh. That could have been kind of stressful.” By 2009 she was drug-free, raising a child, and resuming postdoctoral research at Massachusetts General Hospital. “I have this fantasy,” she said, “of being undiagnosed as bipolar.”⁶⁰

Gøtzsche describes the broader dynamic as “the fly paper of psychiatry.” The more symptoms drugs produce, the more diagnoses accumulate, the more drugs are prescribed. Patients quickly learn to protect themselves — they refrain from mentioning certain things to avoid additional diagnoses and additional drugging. “In the end, no one can remember how it all started and what life was like before the patient got a diagnosis. Patients become chemically induced, artificial products with brains and personalities that are no longer the same.” His conclusion: “It should be forbidden to make new diagnoses in patients on psychiatric drugs.”³⁵

What the Symptoms Express

If bipolar disorder is not a chemical imbalance — and no test exists to detect one, no causal relationship between any biochemical state and any behaviour has ever been established⁶² — then the question that remains is what these experiences actually are.

Breggin answers it directly: “Depression and elation are among the most common human experiences.”⁶³ The theory that a certain intensity of emotional response crosses a line into “abnormality” has no scientific basis. It is a social judgement dressed in clinical language. Depression, in Breggin’s analysis, is “a readily understandable expression of human despair that is frequently responsive to psychosocial help.”⁶³ There is no reason to suppose that the agitation, sleeplessness, or heightened energy labelled as “mania” is any less an intelligible response to circumstances — to toxic burden, chronic depletion, unresolved emotional crisis, or the body’s attempt to compensate after a period of collapse.

Dorea was a young woman dealing with the stress of coming out as a lesbian without family support. Monica broke down at college. Biederman’s “bipolar” children — the ones he insisted had no trauma histories — were, by every account, children in extreme distress. Psychiatrist James Deutsch saw it immediately. Biederman could not afford to.

The body under sustained insult — neurotoxic exposure, nutritional deficiency, chronic emotional strain, electromagnetic disruption — produces neurological symptoms. The brain is the organ most sensitive to these insults.⁶⁴ When its bioelectrical and biochemical functioning is disrupted, the symptoms manifest as cognitive, emotional, and behavioural disturbance. A person cycling between despair and agitation is not expressing a brain disease. They are expressing a distressed terrain — a body overwhelmed by more than it can process.

Breggin identified a principle that applies to every drug prescribed for this condition. He called it the brain-disabling principle: all psychoactive substances work by causing dysfunction of the brain and mind.⁶² The perceived “therapeutic effect” is itself a disability — diminished cognitive and emotional capacity mistaken for improvement because the original distress has been chemically suppressed. This maps precisely onto the outcome data. The drugs do not fail to treat bipolar disorder. They succeed at disabling the brain. The convergence with schizophrenia outcomes is not a mystery. It is the predictable result of similar neurotoxic cocktails applied to two different diagnostic labels.

The acute-to-chronic progression that Herbert Shelton described operates here in plain sight.⁶⁵ The body produces intense symptoms — emotional extremes, sleeplessness, agitation. These are suppressed with drugs. The suppression adds new toxins. New symptoms emerge. These are suppressed in turn, often with additional drugs. The cycle drives what was an acute episode toward chronic illness. What medicine calls “treatment-resistant bipolar disorder” is not an inherent biological trajectory. It is the consequence of continuous poisoning plus continuous suppression — each round deepening the damage, each new symptom earning a new prescription.

Samina Salim’s 2014 review in Current Neuropharmacology confirms that oxidative stress — the cellular damage produced when free radical generation exceeds the body’s antioxidant defences — is consistently elevated in people diagnosed with bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia.⁶⁶ The mechanism is not complicated: inadequate nutrition depletes antioxidant capacity; toxic exposure and chronic stress increase free radical production; the resulting oxidative damage strikes the brain hardest because of its high oxygen consumption and lipid-rich environment. The establishment documents the oxidative stress. It does not follow the finding to its conclusion: address the causes rather than adding more toxins.

The Arithmetic

The numbers resolve into simple equations.

Prescribe stimulants to 3.5 million children; 11 percent develop bipolar symptoms within four years: 400,000 bipolar youth.¹⁹ Treat 2 million children with SSRIs for depression; 25 to 50 percent convert to bipolar within a decade: another 500,000 to 1 million.²⁴ ²⁵ These figures account for the juvenile bipolar epidemic without invoking a single new case of organic illness.

The adult pathway runs at a slower pace but identical logic. Antidepressants convert 7.7 percent of depressed patients to bipolar per year.¹ SSRIs saturated the American market in the 1990s. From 1996 to 2004, adult bipolar diagnoses rose 56 percent.³⁷ The SSRIs preceded the epidemic. The epidemic did not precede the SSRIs.

A condition that once affected one in 13,000 Americans now affects one in 40. Its outcomes have deteriorated from 85 percent functional recovery to 33 percent. Its cognitive trajectory has converged with schizophrenia. The field that produced this result describes it as progress — “major therapeutic advances” under which disability and poor outcomes are, regrettably, “prevalent.”

The bipolar diagnosis, for the majority who carry it, is not a discovery about what is wrong with them. It is the end product of a pharmaceutical sequence: the first drug creates the symptoms, the symptoms earn the label, the label authorises the cocktail, and the cocktail produces the disability that confirms how serious the condition always was. Nobody inside this loop is funded to ask whether the condition exists independently of the treatment that produces it.

The documents that establish this are publicly available. The researchers who produced the data are among the most credentialed in the field. Several of them stood before their colleagues at the APA’s own annual meeting and stated that the treatments had altered the illness beyond recognition, produced cognitive deterioration, and shortened lives by twelve to twenty years.

The audience booed.

Explaining It to a Six-Year-Old

Sometimes people feel very, very sad. And sometimes people feel very, very excited and full of energy. Most of the time, these feelings come and go, and there are reasons for them — something happened, or something is bothering their body, or they didn’t sleep enough, or they ate something that made them feel bad.

A long time ago, doctors noticed that some people would swing between feeling very sad and feeling very excited. It didn’t happen to many people, and most of them got better on their own.

Then doctors started giving sad people a medicine. But the medicine sometimes made people go the other way — it made them feel too excited, too fast, too wound up. The doctors didn’t say “the medicine did this.” They said “you have a new sickness called bipolar.” And they gave them more medicine.

The new medicine made some people feel foggy and slow. It made it hard to think. It made them gain weight and feel tired. When they tried to stop taking it, they felt even worse than before they started. So they kept taking it.

Then the doctors gave this name to children, too. Children who were angry, or sad, or had too much energy — the doctors said they had bipolar. They put them on strong medicines that were meant for grown-ups. The children got worse. The doctors said that proved how sick they were.

Before any of the medicines existed, most people with these big feelings got better and went back to their normal lives. After the medicines, most of them didn’t.

The medicines were supposed to fix the feelings. Instead, the medicines became the reason the feelings never went away.

---

References

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3. El-Mallakh, R. “Use of antidepressants to treat depression in bipolar disorder.” Psychiatric Services 53 (2002): 580–84.

4. Whitaker, R. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2010. Chapter on bipolar disorder, citing NIMH admission data.

5. NIMH, The Numbers Count: Mental Disorders in America; Johns Hopkins School of Public Health data as cited in Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic.

6. Kraepelin, E. Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie (1899); Kraepelin, E. Manic Depressive Insanity and Paranoia (1921 English translation).

7. Pollock, H. As cited in Winokur, G. Manic Depressive Illness. St. Louis: The C.V. Mosby Company, 1969.

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14. American Psychiatric Association. Practice Guidelines for Major Depressive Disorder in Adults. Washington, DC: APA, 1993, 22.

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17. Goodwin, F. Manic-Depressive Illness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, 647. German psychiatric observations from the 1960s cited therein.

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20. Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic, chapter on bipolar disorder in children, synthesising NIMH symptom criteria with stimulant pharmacology.

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23. Martin, A., et al. “Age effects on antidepressant-induced manic conversion.” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine 158 (2004): 773–80.

24. Faedda, G., et al. “Pediatric onset bipolar disorder.” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 3 (1995): 171–95.

25. Geller, B. “Bipolar disorder at prospective follow-up of adults who had prepubertal major depressive disorder.” American Journal of Psychiatry 158 (2001): 125–27.

26. Cicero, D., et al. “Antidepressant exposure in bipolar children.” Psychiatry 66 (2003): 317–22.

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29. Hellander, M., and Burke, T. “Children with bipolar disorder.” Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 38 (1999): 495.

30. Greenberg, G. The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. New York: Plume/Penguin, 2013. Chapter 5.

31. Ibid. Including Biederman’s Jenner comparison and colleagues’ objections.

32. DSM-IV-TR, 400.

33. Biederman deposition testimony (2009), as cited in Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic.

34. Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic, citing Grassley investigation findings and Biederman’s 2002 internal report on the J&J Center.

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