Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate his Department has made of the number of people diagnosed with a bipolar condition.

The information requested is not available in the format requested, due to limitations of the diagnosis data collected within the Mental Health Services Dataset.

Analysis shows that around 20-25% of people in the dataset have a diagnosis recorded, therefore any data provided for diagnosis would represent an undercount. Alternative data is presented showing the number of referrals to secondary mental health services where the primary reason for referral was bipolar disorder in England between 2021/22 and 2022/23.

According to NHS England, the number of referrals to mental health services in England where the primary reason for referral was recorded as bipolar disorder was 20,201 in 2021/22 and 19,805 in 2022/23. Additionally, data for 2022/23 were impacted by a cyber incident, which meant that some providers were unable to submit data and the number of referrals may be underreported.