Familial severe psychiatric history in bipolar disorder and correlation with disease severity and treatment response.

•Familial psychiatric history correlated with several disease severity measures (hospitalizations, suicide attempts, and earlier onset) and sociodemographic markers (lower education and household income).•Familial psychiatric history was not correlated with cardiometabolic markers or risk scores.•Patients with familial psychiatric history tended to require more psychopharmacological treatment (p=0.054) but responded similarly (all p>0.1) to all four treatment arms.