I have cramps, so my eggs must be bipolar

In the last couple of years Bipolar Disorder has become a popular diagnosis for kids, with doctors citing silliness and temper tantrums as symptoms in afflicted preschoolers. Color me skeptical, but while I have no doubt that BPD can and does express itself at a young age, I don’t think that 1 million–a forty-fold increase since 1994–is an accurate number.

As the number of diagnoses has gone up, the age at labeling has decreased until even toddlers are being treated with psychotropic drugs. Superlagirl takes this trend to it’s logical conclusion with this fictional news report.

Fiction from Superlagirl:

The fetus, who Mandi Donaldson has named Piper, demonstrated extreme mood swings as early as 20 weeks. “Sometimes she would just lie there for hours, and other times she just couldn’t be still. She was completely erratic.” The symptoms worsened as the weeks went by with Piper’s agitation growing progressively stronger. “She started kicking me in the kidney over and over again. I knew something was definitely wrong, but I never suspected mental illness. I thought she was just a little shit.”

Dr. Matthew Pearson, chair of the newly developed Fetal Psychiatry Department at Johns Hopkins, says this type of behavior is characteristic of Fetal Bipolar Disorder. “These fetuses are very sick and very difficult to care for. They rapidly cycle between depression and mania, causing extreme distress for their mothers, including heartburn and frequent urge to urinate.”

Although the diagnosis of Fetal Bipolar Disorder has been in use since 2005, it gained much attention last month when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report showing that the number of new diagnoses had increased 300% in the past two years. The rising rates of Fetal Bipolar Disorder have been met with alarm by obstetricians who say that more research is needed in the field now that the diagnosis is being applied on a wide scale. Bart Mohan of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology suggests that the current estimates of the prevalence of the disease may fall drastically short of the true number of cases.

“Look, we don’t know how many fetuses are affected by this disease. It could be thousands. There may be thousands more with subclinical symptoms. We need to develop standards of practice in treating these cases, but we can’t do that until we have accurate and reliable screening procedures. Obviously, the standard of practice is going to be immediate C-Section, but we at least need to give the impression we’re being scientific about it.”

Sure wish I’d written that.

Related: Half of kids labeled bipolar may be misdiagnosed