Pediatric bipolar disorder (BD) is a significant global health concern, with clinical studies suggesting an increased rate of children diagnosed with the mood disorder during the past few decades. For example, the percentage of minors with a BD diagnosis admitted to German psychiatric hospitals increased 68.5% between 2000 and 2007, whereas those discharged from U.S. psychiatric hospitals surged from less than 10% in the mid-1990s to more than 20% in the mid-2000s (1). Another study showed this increase was not confined to psychiatric hospitals, with a forty-fold rise in the incidence of U.S. outpatient visits for youth diagnosed with BD to providers of all mental health specialties, from 25/100,000 in 1993–1994 to 1003/100,000 in 2002–2003 (2). Moreover, with an estimated overall prevalence of 1.8% (3), and more than 80 million children in the U.S. per the 2000 Census, there are millions of children and adolescents being brought for evaluation/treatment of BD annually (4). Beyond the obvious concern for the sheer number of youth affected by the disorder, pediatric BD results in substantial morbidity and functional impairment for the affected children and their families (5;6) including high rates of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts (7).