Bipolar Disorder

A recent study shows that meditative practice is surprisingly effective for bipolar depression. The late poet helps explain why.

These mood stabilizers cover a lot of ground, but it is important to know how to use them.

During this time of social isolation, people who are single may be having a difficult time. Staying home in lockdown may mean they haven't been seen or touched another person in weeks or months. A board-certified pediatrician and adult and child psychiatrist discusses these issues in this podcast.

The mortality rate is unacceptably high in patient with serious mental illnesses. Several psychosocial interventions have been developed that may benefit these patients.

Children are struggling through the pandemic. Here are strategies to spot symptoms before things get out of hand.

A child/adolescent and adult psychiatrist answers three key questions regarding youth and COVID-19.

None of them are perfect, but a few rise to the top, according to recent guidelines.

A constellation of factors contributes to heightened anxiety symptoms associated with the pandemic. The author offers simple steps to help patients alleviate stress.

Patients with bipolar disorder often find it difficult to maintain schedules and routines, all the more challenging with the COVID-19 pandemic. More in this video.

Lithium may have antiviral properties, but it also carries unique risks during a viral infection.

Lithium has successfully deterred over a dozen viruses, but how will it affect the novel coronavirus? In this podcast, Chris Aiken, MD, speaks with Janusz Rybakowski, PhD, MD, a pioneer in lithium research who helped discover its antiviral properties.

Sleep deprivation increases the risk of viral infections and even mania. Here is the evidence.

Regardless of whatever short-term benefit patients perceive from cannabis, the evidence points clearly to an association between usage and worsening course of bipolar disorder over time.

A number of factors affect treatment adherence, including the therapeutic alliance, perceived perceived lack of control, risk of dependence on medications, stigma associated with medication use, and more.

Experts discuss the rationale and history of L-methylfolate use in patients, and then shares three cases that collectively suggest L-methylfolate may contribute to agitation and mania.

When we meet a new patient who presents with "classic" symptoms, there are challenges described in this brief video.

This review highlights an important diagnostic and therapeutic task: the importance of differentiating true bipolar disorder/obsessive-compulsive disorder comorbidity from BD with secondary OCD.

When we find ourselves in the half-tested world of off-label therapies, what’s a psychiatrist to do?

The treatment of bipolar disorder changed in ways big and small in 2019. More in this summary.

Do you need help persuading patients to try lithium?

An accurate assessment of bipolar disorder requires psychiatric evaluation of a range of symptoms marked by extreme mood changes and other factors described in brief.

Just as the progress over recent decades has improved the clinical evaluation and management of BD among children and adolescents, the remaining gaps serve to inform future progress.

The first part of this series covered updates on traditional psychotropics-lithium, anticonvulsants, antipsychotics, and more. Here, Part 2 examines anti-inflammatories, natural supplements, and mitochondrial therapies.

This adverse reaction to clozapine causes more fatalities than neutropenia. Here’s how to prevent it.

For most patients, bipolar is a disorder of depression. It’s here that they spend the majority of their days...

Environmental factors in addition to climate change-air pollution, toxins, noise-seem to have detrimental psychological repercussions.

There appears to be some confusion regarding the efficacy of aripiprazole in bipolar mania and depression and for preventing bipolar episodes.

"Psychiatry has been frozen in time since the 80s, and hence the absence of progress since then is no surprise." So says, S. Nassir Ghaemi, MD, MPH, in the next installment of Conversations in Critical Psychiatry with Awais Aftab, MD.

A summary of some of the latest findings in bipolar disorder research.

The good, the bad, and the efficacy of lamotrigine.