A psychosocial study of early-onset bipolar disorder.

A 4-year study of 48 bipolar subjects and matched controls looked closely at the psychosocial histories of an early-onset subsample. A significant majority of these biographies include five distinct features: treatment as the special child of the family, high achievement in school, evidence of symptomatology in childhood, first episode soon after leaving home, and characteristic content in later symptomatology. The authors suggest that the findings provide a replication of a well-known study and that they further specify the increasingly evident differences between early- and late-onset bipolar patients.