Can ADHD be misdiagnosed as bipolar?

Approximately 20 percent of people with ADHD also suffer from bipolar disorder, a serious mental illness characterized by depressive and manic episodes. Since both conditions share symptoms, but ADHD is more common, bipolar disorder is often missed or misdiagnosed.

Am I bipolar or is it just my ADHD?

In bipolar disorder, cognitive symptoms worsen with age and with the number of past episodes. In ADHD, they often improve or resolve between ages 18-25. It is often said that cognitive symptoms are persistent and stable in ADHD, while in bipolar disorder they cycle in and out with the episodes.

What is ADHD often misdiagnosed as?

Misdiagnosed ADHD Symptom: Problems at School

But problems in school can suggest a large number of conditions, including learning disorders, anxiety, or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

What other mental disorders come with ADHD?

ADHD Comorbidities & Related Conditions

Roughly 80 percent of those with ADHD are diagnosed with at least one other psychiatric disorder sometime during their life. The most common ADHD comorbidities are learning disabilities, anxiety, depression, sensory processing disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder.

How often do doctors misdiagnose ADHD?

Overall, the study found that about 20 percent – or 900,000 – of the 4.5 million children currently identified as having ADHD likely have been misdiagnosed.

Bipolar Disorder vs ADHD: A Common Misdiagnosis

Can ADHD cause manic episodes?

Manic episodes are not a symptom of ADHD, but a person with ADHD may experience some of the symptoms of a hypomanic episode. Although there may be some symptom similarities, the underlying causes of bipolar disorder and ADHD are different.

What can mimic bipolar?

Some non-psychiatric illnesses, such as thyroid disease, lupus, HIV, syphilis, and other infections, may have signs and symptoms that mimic those of bipolar disorder. This can pose further challenges in making a diagnosis and determining the treatment.

Does bipolar and ADHD go hand in hand?

Co-occurring psychiatric conditions—like anxiety and ADHD—often go hand-in-hand with bipolar disorder. What we need to remember is that these conditions require separate diagnoses and each have different treatment plans that manage symptoms and improve your quality of life.

Can adult ADHD be confused with bipolar?

Approximately 20 percent of people with ADHD also suffer from bipolar disorder, a serious mental illness characterized by depressive and manic episodes. Since both conditions share symptoms, but ADHD is more common, bipolar disorder is often missed or misdiagnosed.

What does ADHD and bipolar look like together?

It is understandable that doctors confuse bipolar symptoms for those of ADHD. Both conditions involve impulsivity, irritability, hyperactivity, emotional dysregulation, sleep problems, a racing brain, and problems with maintaining attention.

Does ADHD medication make bipolar worse?

Using stimulants like Adderall during a depressive episode may increase the risk of a manic episode. A 2008 study found that 40 percent of participants using stimulants for bipolar disorder experienced stimulant-associated mania.

What is commonly misdiagnosed as bipolar?

Consequences of Misdiagnosis

As mentioned previously, the most common misdiagnosis for bipolar patients is unipolar depression. An incorrect diagnosis of unipolar depression carries the risk of inappropriate treatment with antidepressants, which can result in manic episodes and trigger rapid cycling.

Why is bipolar misdiagnosed?

Patients with bipolar disorder are often misdiagnosed as having unipolar depression in many circumstances. The reason is related to clinicians or patients lacking knowledge about manic and hypomanic symptoms.

What does undiagnosed bipolar look like?

The main sign of bipolar disorder is extreme mood swings that go from emotional highs to emotional lows. Manic episodes cause people to seem very energetic, euphoric, or irritable. During depressive episodes, your loved one may seem sad, upset, or tired all the time.

Is ADHD a form of mania?

One criteria of mania is heightened activity, which can look like the hyperactivity associated with ADHD. The irritability of mania looks like the low frustration tolerance that comes with ADHD. The poor judgment of mania looks like impulsivity of ADHD. Both include distractibility.

What is the best medicine for bipolar and ADHD?

Medications for ADHD and Bipolar Disorder

The most commonly used medications for bipolar disorder include antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and benzodiazepines. ADHD in adults and children is usually treated with nervous system stimulants like methylphenidate or as it is commonly known as Ritalin.

What is the most misdiagnosed mental illness?

Depression was found to be the most likely misdiagnosed mental disorder instead of bipolar disorder and bipolar disorder was most likely misdiagnosed with depressive disorders [24, 25].

How do you rule out bipolar disorder?

To diagnose bipolar disorder, a doctor performs a physical exam, asks about your symptoms, and recommends blood testing to determine if another condition, such as hypothyroidism, is causing your symptoms. If the doctor does not find an underlying cause of your symptoms, he or she performs a psychological evaluation.

Is bipolar hard to diagnose?

Bipolar disorder type II is especially difficult to diagnose accurately because of the difficulty in differentiation of this disorder from recurrent unipolar depression (recurrent depressive episodes) in depressed patients.

How often is bipolar overdiagnosed?

Only 33% of patients previously diagnosed with a bipolar disorder met full criteria for Bipolar I or II. The authors concluded that 67% of patients were overdiagnosed with bipolar disorder (Goldberg et al., 2008). The Hirschfeld et al.

Is bipolar disorder caused by childhood trauma?

Childhood traumatic events are risk factors for developing bipolar disorders, in addition to a more severe clinical presentation over time (primarily an earlier age at onset and an increased risk of suicide attempt and substance misuse).

Can I be bipolar without mania?

Bipolar II disorder is a type of bipolar disorder in which people experience depressive episodes as well as hypomanic episodes (shifting back and forth), but never mania. People with bipolar II disorder tend to have longer and more frequent depressed episodes than people with bipolar I disorder.

Does Adderall work for bipolar?

Adderall has not been approved to treat bipolar disorder by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but has begun to be prescribed by some psychiatrists as a way to boost mood and energy for people struggling with a depressive mood cycle brought on by bipolar disorder.

What is Ring of Fire ADHD?

Ring of Fire ADD is a type of ADD characterized by abnormally increased activity in multiple areas of the brain, which in individuals on qEEG brain mapping scans can appear as over activity or overstimulation.

At what age does ADHD peak?

The symptoms of hyperactivity are typically most severe at age 7 to 8, gradually declining thereafter. Peak severity of impulsive behaviour is usually at age 7 or 8. There is no specific age of peak severity for inattentive behaviour.