Gentlemen, we've got to stop this phony baloney epidemic!

Just in case you were running out of things to panic about, The New York Times comes to our rescue.

The number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003, researchers report today in the most comprehensive study of the controversial diagnosis.

Experts say the number has almost certainly risen further since 2003.

[...]

In the study, researchers from New York, Maryland and Madrid analyzed a National Center for Health Statistics survey of office visits that focused on doctors in private or group practices. The researchers calculated the number of visits in which doctors recorded diagnoses of bipolar disorder and found that they increased, from 20,000 in 1994 to 800,000 in 2003, about 1 percent of the population under age 20.

At this rate, everyone in America under the age of twenty will be bipolar by the year 2014 and many of them will be unable to contribute to my Social Security.