Formerly, bipolar disorder in children is said to less likely to happen. However, early onset bipolar disorder or pediatric bipolar disorder, other names for bipolar disorder in children, has been changing rapidly, emerging from obscurity.

Decades ago, the medical community hardly considered diagnosis of bipolar disorder. a psychiatrist and professor at Washington University notes that until a few years ago, “It was considered quackery to talk about bipolar disorder in children”. There is few recorded issue or articles or researches concerning bipolar disorder in children.

This is not the case now. Bipolar disorder in children has caught many scholars’ attention. Two researchers at New York University, Anthony Russo and Brady Case, , reported that the number of children under 18 who had been confirmed to have bipolar disorder increased fourfold between 1999 and 2000. And the number of children under 13 who have been diagnosed to with bipolar disorder is 600 times of those ten years ago. The 2008 Annual Review of Clinical Psychology has a chapter fully dedicated to the discussion of bipolar disorder in children.

Correspondingly, researchers are now placing importance on this specific field of study. In the past five years there has been twice as many research articles published than in the previous decade.