Bipolar Affective Disorder: All About It

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August 5, 2009

A psychological sickness in which a patient has mood cycles or mood swings is regarded as bipolar affective disorder, more commonly known as manic depression or bipolar disorder. The person’s mood jumps from ordinary to manic to depressed in a cycle. Depression episodes are usually accompanied by extreme sadness and feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness, decreased energy, and sleeping too much. Distrability, increased energy, inability to sleep, extreme contentment, and racing thoughts accompany manic episodes. Mixed episodes, in which the patient shows symptoms of both mania and depression at the same time, can also happen.

A combination of emotional, neurological, environmental, and biological factors cause bipolar affective disorder. The true reasons behind bipolar affective disorder are not completely accepted. However, researchers and doctors are continuously making progress in this area.

Bipolar affective disorder comes in 2 types. The first type involves periods of extreme depression and mania swapping with an almost relentless case of minor mania. The second type involves little, minor bouts of mania, swapping with continuous depression.

Before bipolar affective disorder was completely accepted, folk with the 1st kind of the sickness were frequently misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. This is due to the fact that many with type one bipolar affective disorder have dispositions to lose touch with fact, have hallucinations, or have delusions during worse manic phases.

The second type of bipolar affective disorder is often misdiagnosed as clinical depression. The reason being because patients do not whinge about being ecstatic during their manic episodes, and are most frequently depressed. After medication treatment has started for depression, diagnoses are typically corrected then. Anti-depressants used with bipolar patients tend to throw the patient into a manic phase. If this happens, the doctor will instantly realize their error and switch the patient to a mood stabilizer.

There are many treatment alternatives for bipolar affective disorder. The most typical treatment for bipolar affective disorder is a mix of medicine and care, or support. Medication options include mood stabilizers, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics. conventional counseling techniques, as well as emotive behaviour therapy, rational behaviour therapy, and cognitive behaviour therapy are a few of the treatment options included. New therapy treatments discovered to be successful include EBT, RBT, and CBT. Frequently successful results can be had with EBT, CBT, or RBT alone for patients who aren’t candidates for medicine.

While bipolar affective disorder is not a new illness, there’s still very little known about the topic. As doctors and researchers learn more about the brain and how it functions, the more probable a treatment for bipolar affective disorder will be found. Meanwhile, contact a mental health professional for your treatment possibilities if you are feeling that you have the symptoms of bipolar affective disorder. Family or friends who notice these symptoms in others should also try to help that person find help for their psychological illness. If you are ready to go thru treatment to regulate it, bipolar affective disorder does not need to control your life.

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