Compared to depression, bipolar disorder has a higher complexity, relapse rate and suicide rate, and is more deadly to oneself and one's surroundings. Fang Yiru, director of the Department of Mental Disorders at the Shanghai Mental Health Centre, estimates that the lifetime recurrence rate of bipolar disorder is as high as 90%, higher than that of depression at 80%. Foreign research has found that about 20% to 40% of its patients have had suicidal behaviour, and the risk of suicide is 10 times that of the general population. Between bipolar disorder and depression, a person's state is like an up and down and continuous curve, and this line may be broken at any time.
In the bipolar disorder clinic, many of the people who come to the clinic are teenagers and students. Ma Yantao, head of the Affective Disorders Group at the Sixth Hospital of Peking University, once told this reporter that a distinctive feature of bipolar disorder in China in recent years is that the age of onset is early. "Some children are 15 years old and are in the critical period of schooling from junior high school to senior high school when they start to have this problem." According to Ma Yantao's observations, "In the last 10 years, there has been a rapid rise in the incidence of bipolar disorder in the group as a whole, and in Chinese society in particular."
Tang believes that this is related to the fact that the adolescent brain is not yet fully developed. "When these children's nerves are still excitable and their brains have not yet fully established the defence system of rational thinking, they are subject to multiple pressures from school, family and society, and can easily be affected to collapse." Tang fears that in 10 years' time, this could become a social problem. Wang added that one of the pitfalls of an earlier age of onset is that "depression in adolescents is more likely to develop into bipolar disorder than in older patients".
Comments