The Kids page is a webpage for kids with bipolar disorder, parents, siblings, teachers and friends.

• Brandon and the Bipolar Bear
• Mood Charting
• Mood Posters
• Articles
• Books

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Center for the Ketamine Clinical Study is a website that provides all the information and links relevant to the Ketamine Clinical Study. This research conducts a behavioral profile which describes those children on the bipolar spectrum who are most severely affected by the illness (the Fear of Harm (FOH) phenotype). The Ketamine Clinical Study will be a formal test of the pilot study results

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The Clinician Pathway Program is a diagnostic assessment program for Juvenile Bipolar Disorder. The Diagnostic Assessment Program for Juvenile Bipolar Disorder is designed for use in clinical and research settings to screen for bipolar disorder in children from parent and child reports. The program provides preliminary diagnostic and symptom severity measures, as well as scaled scores of other key symptom dimensions (anxiety, sleep/wake disturbance, mania, sensory sensitivity and others). It includes two easy-to-use self-administered questionnaires:

• The Child Bipolar Questionnaire (CBQ) for parents and
• The Jeannie and Jeffrey Illustrated Interview for Children (J/J)

The CBQ has collected profile data on over 19,000 children with a community diagnosis of bipolar disorder or at risk for the disorder. The large numbers of subject profiles have allowed investigators to:

• Identify a highly heritable trait of the disorder
• Identify a new view of the disorder based on behavioral dimensions
• Determine the heritability of the resulting dimensions through concordance analysis
• Further refine and investigate the most salient heritable features
• Arrive at a highly refined, clinically homogeneous and heritable phenotype, called the FOH phenotype, which can easily be identified by 4 factors of the CBQ with 96% accuracy.
• Propose a hypothesis of the underlying biology of the FOH phenotype as well as identify a potential biomarker for the illness.

The effectiveness of the CBQ to rapidly, inexpensively and accurately identify phenotypes of pediatric bipolar disorder eliminates obstacles posed by previous screening and diagnostic instruments. Additionally, the inherent flexibility of the CBQ ensures that it will continue to be a means to identify other behavioral subtypes in the future. The broad scope of symptoms it captures can be examined and re-examined under the focus of different lenses. As the field of psychiatric research moves more into a dimensional, rather than categorical framework, the data will stand ready to continue yielding specific subtypes that can lead to more insight and better, more targeted treatment.

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Illustrated Interview for Children is an interview for Children (J/J), the pediatric companion instrument to the CBQ.  It is the first assessment tool for bipolar disorder designed specifically for children. The J/J has comic-strip style illustrations that engage the child’s interest while diminishing the threat of self-disclosure.  This format promotes the child’s willingness and ability to reveal mood states, fears, suicidal thoughts and/or hallucinations that he or she may be unwilling to talk about with the parent and clinician.

Through the child’s responses to the various illustrations the psychiatrist, therapist and parent are able to gain insight into the child’s internal world.  The child, through his or her responses to pictures, is able to communicate ideologies which he or she is unable or unwilling to express orally.  The ability to share these thoughts/feelings/emotions/hallucinations makes the child feel less isolated and alone.  Moreover, the completed diagnostic instrument gives information so that medical and therapeutic interventions can be tailored to each child’s concerns and subjective feelings as well as to his or her behaviors. Each questions is illustrated with pictures designed to allow the child to endorse a symptom or behavior without the use of words.

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JBRF Professional Listserv is an online forum to professionals around the world who diagnose, treat or supervise the treatment of children and adolescents with bipolar disorder. The Professional Listserv provides a venue for the free exchange of expertise and clinical observations among professionals as well as a format in which clinicians can elicit the opinions of others for treatment options and diagnostic questions.

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The Expert Diagnostic Workshop on Juvenile-onset Bipolar Disorder is an expert diagnostic workshop to examine case descriptions, course of illness, and comprehensive information (in the form of a diagnostic interview, K-SADS P/L, as well as individual behavioral and symptom inventories derived from parents, clinicians, teachers, and the patients), clinicians and researchers will have an opportunity to examine, deliberate, and then discuss the various features, advantages and disadvantages of four separate diagnostic schemas – the standard set of diagnostic criteria derived from adult studies and published in the DSM-IV, and 3 other proposed sets of diagnostic criteria for juvenile-onset bipolar disorder: the Narrow, Broad, and Core phenotypes. Not merely an academic exercise, the data that emerges from this diagnostic workshop, coupled with open deliberations and discussions with peers in on-line forums, will, potentially, have significant implications for treatment decisions, planning and outcome, as well as for future epidemiological and genetic studies.

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