People with bipolar face a decade-long wait for diagnosis (Stock image)
(Picture: PA)Tens of thousands of people with bipolar are attempting to take their own lives due to 10-year delays in getting a diagnosis, a major report has warned.
The mental health condition, estimated to have one million people in the UK, causes extreme mood swings and changes in mood and energy levels.
The Bipolar Commission Report, released on Tuesday, warned that the current system of diagnosis and treatment “isn’t working”. It takes an average of 9.5 years to be given a diagnosis while 36 per cent of those with the condition said they had attempted to take their own life due to the delay, the report said.
Researchers said that “time to treatment” had a significant impact on hospitalisations and suicide attempts. Just over one in three people with bipolar said they attempted to take their own life because of the delay.
Young people are twice as likely to test positive for bipolar as others, the report found, with onset of the disorder generally between the ages of 15 and 25. Many are feared to be “slipping under the radar” or treated wrongly for depression or other conditions, it said.
People can be told they have depression and spend years on antidepressants, while key treatments such as lithium and lamotrigine are under-used.
Over half of people with bipolar (56 per cent) were found not to have received a diagnosis while six in ten were not receiving specific treatment or support for the condition, according to the study.
Professor Guy Goodwin, emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford and co-chairman of the Bipolar Commission, told a briefing: “Our conclusion is that the episodic care that people are receiving just isn’t working.
“Psychiatric services see people when they are acutely ill… but, once recovered, people are discharged back to the care of their general practitioner.
“And that model we simply think doesn’t work.”
He said there is “under-prescribing of some of the treatments that we would like to see used a little more frequently than they are.
“That includes the gold standard treatment, which is lithium. There’s evidence that it’s use is tending to fall…”
The report was based on an 18-month programme of of interviews, surveys and desktop research by a number of leading psychiatrists and academics.
It said other reasons for a delay in diagnosis include a lack of psychiatrists, medics not asking people about previous periods of hypomania (over-active and excited behaviour), and a reluctance by patients to get a diagnosis of bipolar due to stigma.
According to the study, bipolar is estimated to cost the UK economy about £20 billion a year and represents 17 pe cent of the total burden of mental illness, while depression represents 23 per cent.
The report included more than 100 one-to-one interviews and more than 7,000 survey responses from people living with bipolar.
It said having bipolar increases the risk of suicide by 20 times and at least 5 per cent of all suicides are by people living with bipolar.
Relapse rates are high, with 98 per cent of people surveyed saying they have relapsed at least once and 52 per cent have been admitted to hospital.
Despite relapsing, a third of people surveyed said they had not been offered any psychological therapies and many had not been given support in preventing further relapses.
Bipolar was also found to have an impact on obesity, with 44 per cent of people surveyed with bipolar being clinically obese – far higher than the national average.
The experts said that, in order to reduce diagnosis times, bipolar screening should be ingrained in primary and secondary NHS care, while there should be specialist training in spotting the condition.
They added: “People with bipolar are asking for something very simple – a clinician who knows them, who is an expert in bipolar and who will work with them for years to manage the condition well.”
