Bipolar disorder treatment requires mood-stabilizing medication. Compliance with medication is one of the biggest challenges in treating bipolar disorder. says Tarique Perera, MD, a psychiatrist with Contemporary Care of Connecticut.
Read Transcript
To have the diagnosis you have to be on medications. Helping somebody with Bipolar disorder is much easier than with depression you can stabilize them. The issue with Bipolar is compliance, but a lot of medications that treat Bipolar disorder have side effects, because you get manic so infrequently you think why should you take.
Now there is something interesting a lot of the medications especially that can worsen can reduce our creative potential. People with Bipolar disorder tend to be very creative, and it is one of those conditions that is very difficult to sort of model in time and a belief is that is it maybe something that is linked to past the brain that associated with creative things.
I treated a patient, he was 30 years Bipolar and he was on a combination of medications that stabilized him but I believe we were causing cognitive difficulties. After 30 years I switched him to a different medication, and he started writing piano music, and I said where did that come from? He said in college he used to do that he became manic went to the hospital.
They put him on meds he came out he did great but he completely forgot how to write the piano music.
Bipolar disorder, also called manic depression, is characterized by extreme mood swings. Experts discuss the symptoms of bipolar disorder and share tips for effective treatment.
