Bipolar Disorder

Chaput YJA, Lebel MJ. Demographic and clinical profiles of patients who make multiple visits to psychiatric emergency services. Psychiatr Serv. 2007;58:335-341.

Psychiatrists know that it takes longer to interview children and adolescents than adults. Child and adolescent psychiatrists are universally struck by how comparatively easy it is to interview an adult patient, whereas general psychiatrists face the evaluation of a child or adolescent with apprehension.

A complex and heterogeneous condition characterized by a variety of symptoms and marked variability in disease course, bipolar disorder is marked by episodes of depression, hypomania, mania, or psychosis and,patients can experience a mixture of emotional states.

Making the Connection: A Parent's Guide to Medication in AD/HD is a concise, user-friendly book intended for parents of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

According to the CDC, in 2004, suicide was the 11th leading cause of death across all age groups and the 10th leading cause of death for persons aged 14 to 64 years; 32,439 people in the United States took their own lives. Women attempt suicide about 3 times more often than men, although men are 4 times as likely to complete suicide. Anderson and Smith3 reported that suicide was the eighth leading cause of death among men in 2001. Of the 24,672 completed suicides among men, 60% involved the use of a firearm (the use of a firearm was the means of suicide in 55% of all cases).

A 79-year-old woman recently died in a fire at her Washington, DC, row house when "pack rat conditions" prevented firefighters from reaching her in time. A few days later, 47 firefighters from 4 cities spent 2 hours fighting a fire in a Southern California home before they were able to bring it under control. Floor-to-ceiling clutter had made it nearly impossible for them to enter the house.

In The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger describes the desperate plight of sailors and fisherman who, in the fall of 1991, were caught out in the Atlantic Ocean as 2 powerful storms converged into 1.1 Like those mariners, emergency department (ED) clinicians find themselves at the confluence of 2 powerful trends in modern society.

The following cases highlight some of the challenges clinicians face when treating patients in whom malingerling is suspected. One key aspect of these evaluations is not overlooking signs or symptoms that point to serious illness.

When a new patient with depression enters your practice, you face a diagnostic dilemma. If you miss bipolar disorder (BD), and prescribe an antidepressant, you can do harm. But if you call a unipolar depression "bipolar," you may also do harm, because lithium, anticonvulsants, and atypical antipsychotics carry significant risk as both short- and long-term treatments. In addition, the label of "BD" currently carries much more stigma than the term "depression."

Bipolar disorder is often accompanied by a host of other medical and psychiatric comorbidities. Recent evidence suggests that the illness is not as benign as originally considered . . .

There is growing evidence that individuals with bipolar affective disorder have cognitive impairments, even during periods of symptom remission.

Suicide is a serious public health problem that ranks as the 11th leading cause of death in the United States. Within the 15- to 24-year-old age group, it is the third leading cause of death.1 Many suicide victims have had contact with the mental health system before they died, and almost one fifth had been psychiatrically hospitalized in the year before completing suicide. A recent review found that psychiatric illness is a major contributing factor to suicide, and more than 90% of suicide victims have a DSM-IV diagnosis.

Unlike a pure psychiatric disabilityevaluation, mental and emotionaldamage claims require anassessment of causation. Today, treatingpsychiatrists are increasingly asked toprovide this assessment, since mentaland emotional damages are widelyclaimed in the United States as a remedyin legal actions.

Paraphilias are defined by DSM-IV-TR as sexual disorders characterized by "recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges or behaviors generally involving (1) nonhuman objects, (2) the suffering or humiliation of oneself or one's partner, or (3) children or other nonconsenting persons that occur over a period of 6 months" (Criterion A), which "cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning" (Criterion B). DSM-IV-TR describes 8 specific disorders of this type (exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism, pedophilia, sexual masochism, sexual sadism, voyeurism, and transvestic fetishism) along with a ninth residual category, paraphilia not otherwise specified (NOS).

Recent issues of Psychiatric Timeshad articles focusing on psychiatricpractice guidelines and algorithms. Dr Michael Fauman examinedthe extent to which they are used,how they are used, and studies that havevalidated their usefulness comparedwith usual care.

Although treatment-resistant depression is defined in terms of a person's depression being resistant to medication, it usually also means that the patient has been unresponsive to whatever psychotherapy has been tried along the way. What might not be clear from the above but is known by all clinicians is that patients with TRD experience much internal suffering and misery.

Over the past 50 years, psychiatry has increasingly become psychiatric medicine coincident with the enormous developments in our understanding of and ability to effectively use clinical psychopharmacology to treat patients with psychiatric illnesses. There have been both increased understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the effects of psychiatric medications and increased numbers of psychiatric medications. The latter has occurred in tandem with a similar explosion in the availability of medications to treat a host of other medical conditions. In fact, the repertoire of available medications expands virtually every few weeks.

As I approach retirement, I have been looking back over the patients I have seen. Although I was trained as a psychoanalyst, most of the therapeutic procedures I have engaged in have, of necessity, been adaptations of my analytic skills in order to meet the needs of particular patients.

A great deal of data exists about the dangers of polypharmacy. Persons with psychiatric disorders experience increased risk for adverse drug interactions because of the great frequency with which multiple medications are used.

Just 2 minutes before an episode of the television show Boston Legal aired, Roger Pitman, MD, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, received a telephone call from his sister-in-law informing him that the show would include a segment on propranolol, a drug he was researching for the prevention and treatment of PTSD.

What is comorbidity? Psychiatric comorbidity refers to the occurrence of 2 or more mental or substance use disorders within a certain period. Research shows that comorbidity of substance use and other psychiatric disorders is common and often worsens the prognosis for each disorder.

Considerable debate exists about the value and wisdom of initiating "definitive" pharmacotherapies, particularly antidepressants, in the psychiatric emergency setting. In this article, the nature and prevalence of medication prescriptions for patients discharged from an urban psychiatric emergency service (PES) and the extent to which pharmacotherapy initiation was predictive of patient follow-through with aftercare were evaluated.

This study determined the prevalence of at-risk drinking in a psychiatric emergency service (PES) and compared the characteristics and functioning of at-risk drinkers with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder with those of at-risk drinkers with depression or anxiety disorders. Of the adult patients who entered the PES and met study criteria, 148 had schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and 242 had depression or anxiety.

Panic disorder occurs in about 1 in 5 individuals who have bipolar disorder. Anxiety amplifies the distress caused by depression and mania, but pharmacological approaches are tricky and under-studied. Frequent comorbidity and evidence of a possible genetic relationship of bipolar and panic disorders are suggestive of a causal relationship between the 2. Thus, it may be fruitful to look more closely at evidence for common biological abnormalities in both disorders to find a pathophysiological mechanism that links mania, depression, and panic attacks. Mood episodes and panic attacks can both be modeled as the result of deficits in amygdala-mediated emotional conditioning. From this model, some insight may be gained for potentially helpful treatment strategies for the 2 disorders when they occur together.

The construct of bipolar spectrum disorder remains a work in progress. Its precise boundaries are still a matter of considerable debate. Some psychiatrists are convinced that it is widely overdiagnosed. It is possible that depending on the clinician and the clinical setting both views are correct.