The goal of this paper is to review assessment research of bipolar
disorder in children and adolescents. The review addresses numerous
themes: the benefits and costs of involving clinical judgment in the
diagnostic process, particularly with regard to diagnosis and mood
severity ratings; the validity of parent, teacher, and youth self-report
of manic symptoms; how much cross-situational consistency is typically
shown in mood and behavior; the extent to which a parent's mental
health status influences their report of child behavior; how different
measures compare in terms of detecting bipolar disorder, the challenges in
comparing the performance of measures across research groups, and the
leading candidates for research or clinical use; evidence-based strategies
for interpreting measures as diagnostic aids; how test performance changes
when a test is used in a new setting and what implications this has for
research samples as well as clinical practice; the role of family history
of mood disorder within an assessment framework; and the implications of
assessment research for the understanding of phenomenology of bipolar
disorder from a developmental framework.We
thank the families who participated in this program of research. This work
was supported in part by NIMH R01 MH066647, as well as a Center Grant from
the Stanley Medical Research Institute.