Researchers Point To Excessive Diagnosis Of Bipolar Disorder
A study conducted at Brown University School of Medicine in Rhode Island suggests that around 50% of cases diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder could be wrong.
This report is one of the latest to have emerged from Brown University, in the United States, with the aim of optimizing the diagnostic evaluationand represents a common front of collaborations between academic researchers and health personnel in the psychiatric field. The study was conducted based on interviews taken with 800 psychiatric patients using a comprehensive diagnostic test, the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders. Respondents also responded to a questionnaire in which they had to specify whether they had been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder or Manic-Depressive Disorder.
146 of those patients indicated that they had been previously diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. However, the researchers realized that only 64 of the patients suffered from Bipolar Disorder based on their own diagnoses using the SCID test.
Controversy: overdiagnosis under magnifying glass
Researchers are considering some explanatory hypotheses for these surprising results that suggest an excessive diagnosis of cases of Bipolar Disorder. Among them, There is speculation that specialists are more likely to diagnose TB compared to other more stigmatizing disorders. and for which there is no clear treatment. Another explanatory theory attributes responsibility for overdiagnosis to aggressive advertising of the drugs used in treatments by pharmaceutical companies. Many professionals and scientists have recently highlighted that ADHD may also be overdiagnosed.
Researchers insist on the need to use standardized and validated methods such as SCID to obtain reliable diagnoses.
