What Is Bipolar Disorder?

What Is Bipolar Disorder?

Bipolar disorder is a brain disorder that triggers changes in your mood, energy, and ability to manage everyday tasks and responsibilities. According to the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, it affects nearly 6 million U.S. adults. Understanding its causes can lead to more accurate diagnoses and effective treatment options.

If you have bipolar disorder, it’s not unusual to experience intense emotional states that happen in days to weeks, called mood episodes. These can be classified as manic/hypomanic (unusually happy or short-tempered mood) or depressive (sad mood). But you can also have neutral moods, too, and anyone with bipolar disorder can enjoy a full and productive life.

Mood changes are also characteristic of bipolar disorder, but they ordinarily last hours instead of days and are less intense. Bipolar disorder can disrupt a person’s relationships with loved ones and cause difficulty working or going to school.

What to Know About Bipolar Disorder?

Symptoms of bipolar disorder can vary by person and the kind of disorder you have, but they generally entail mood swings which are called mood episodes:

Manic episode symptoms can include:

  • Feeling extremely high or elated
  • Feeling more active than usual, as well as jittery or wired
  • Short-tempered episodes or seemingly extreme irritability
  • Racing thoughts and rapid speech
  • Needing less sleep
  • A heightened sense of your importance, talent, or power – with all three being exaggerated
  • Risky behavior and displays of poor judgment, like eating and drinking too much, poor financial decision making, or driving while intoxicated or under the influence of medicine or illegal substances

Bipolar disorder also features depressive episodes with symptoms like:

  • Feelings of sadness, hopelessness, or being worthless
  • You feel lonely or self-isolate from other people
  • You talk slowly, easily forget things, or believe that you don’t have anything important to say
  • Low energy
  • Sleep problems
  • Eating problems
  • Disinterested in usual activities and trouble finishing even simple tasks
  • Preoccupation with death or suicide

If you have bipolar disorder, there’s a chance you could have symptoms from both episodes mixed. Thus, you could feel incredibly sad, have low moods, or have a sense of hopelessness while simultaneously feeling very energized.

Risk factors may include:

  • You have a biological relative, like a parent or sibling, with bipolar disorder
  • You’ve undergone episodes of high stress or life changes, like the death of a loved one, a failed relationship, or another trauma.
  • Substance abuse.

We don’t know precisely what causes bipolar disorder, though years of research have produced several educated guesses. Bipolar disorder may be caused by:

  • Biological differences. If you have bipolar disorder, certain diagnostic procedures may reveal physical changes in your brain that someone without the disorder doesn’t have. We don’t know how significant these changes may be but knowing more could help pinpoint causes and create effective treatment options.
  • There’s a greater risk of you developing the bipolar disorder if it exists within your family.

There are four types of bipolar disorder:

  • Bipolar I Disorder, where you could have one or more instances of mania. Most people with bipolar I will experience mania and depression, but depression isn’t necessary for a diagnosis. Diagnosis depends on your manic episodes lasting at least seven days or severe enough to require hospitalization.
  • Bipolar II Disorder happens when people have alternating episodes of depression and hypomania, but never a complete manic episode.
  • Cyclothymic Disorder or Cyclothymia is a long-term, unbalanced mood state where someone has hypomania and mild depression for two or more years. If you have cyclothymia, you may have short periods of normal mood, but these typically last fewer than eight weeks.
  • Bipolar Disorder, “other specified,” and “unspecified” means that you don’t meet bipolar I, II, or cyclothymia criteria. However, you may still have periods of clinically significant and irregular elevated moods.

Diagnosis & Treatment

Bipolar disorder is diagnosed with a complete medical exam, detailing your and your family’s medical history (including bipolar episodes: when they happened, severity, duration, and potential triggers), tests to uncover a medical reason for the symptoms and a psychiatric assessment. Talking with a mental health specialist is especially important. It will help you understand your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, which may function as triggers, and whether you have a personal or family history of mental illness.

The most common way to treat bipolar disorder is psychotherapy combined with medicine, diet and lifestyle changes, self-help, or ketamine therapy.

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