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