Bipolar and related disorders

Maybe you’ve heard the term “bipolar” used flippantly to describe someone who’s moody, or who has mood swings, but the colloquial use of the term is really different from clinically diagnosed bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder, which used to be called manic depression, is a serious mental disorder that causes a person to have dramatic shifts in emotions, mood, and energy levels: moving from extreme lows to extreme highs. But these shifts don’t happen moment to moment—they usually happen over several days or weeks. Now, bipolar and related disorders include several different conditions, but the most important ones are bipolar I disorder, bipolar II disorder, and cyclothymic disorder.

Now, let’s cover some important clinical features associated with these conditions. The first one is a major depressive episode, which is characterized by the low moods that are identical to those in a related disorder: major depressive disorder, also known as unipolar depression. During major depressive episodes, individuals can feel hopeless and discouraged, lack energy and mental focus, and can have physical symptoms like eating and sleeping too much or too little.

But along with these lows, the thing that sets bipolar disorders apart from unipolar depression is that individuals can have periods of high moods, which are called manic episodes or hypomanic episodes, depending on their level of severity.

Manic episodes are described as an abnormally elevated mood that lasts for at least one week or requires hospitalization. In a manic state, people can feel energetic, overly happy or optimistic, euphoric with really high self-esteem, or even unusually irritable.

And on the surface, these might seem like very positive characteristics, but when an individual is in a full manic episode, these symptoms can reach a dangerous extreme. A person experiencing mania might invest all of their money in a risky business venture or behave recklessly.

Individuals might talk pressured speech, where they talk constantly at a rapid-fire pace, or they might have racing thoughts and might feel “wired,” as if they don’t need sleep.