Photo: Todor Tsvetkov/Getty ImagesWhen it comes to bouts of teenage rage, there are tantrums—and then there are tantrums. Diagnosable ones.Many kids prone to explosive anger, in fact, are labeled bipolar. It’s part of the reason that, in the past decade alone, diagnoses of the disorder in children have soared by a staggering 40 percent, with some estimates putting the prevalence rate as high as 3 percent in adolescents. And that’s particularly noteworthy considering that, before the mid-1990s, almost no one diagnosed bipolar disorder in kids.
What’s happened between then and now has been the fascinating evolution of a pediatric disorder, driven by major psychiatric studies changing the way symptoms of the condition are seen in kids, and culminating, for now at least, with this month’s controversial release of the DSM-5, the official bible of American mental illness.
The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, published by the American Psychiatric Association and used to diagnose patients, is the first
