I Need New Friends

“I thought I needed to replace my friends.” This is how one of our patients described her experience of a several week period of mania last summer. Her friends insisted that she needed to get help and that something had to be done about her energized state. But she had just emerged from a many year depression and felt that …

Brain Scan Diagnosis?

A newly developed brain scanning method that measures blood flow to different parts of the brain may help to distinguish between bipolar and unipolar depression, according to a study that got a fair amount of media attention. The study of 54 adult women used a novel way of measuring brain function called arterial spin labeling (ASL). This approach allowed much …

Emotion Regulation and Bipolar

Researchers from the University of Mannheim investigated brain activity in people at increased risk of bipolar disorder to see if there was something about how these people handled negative emotions that might them be at increased risk of mood cycles. They used a powerful brain imaging technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging that allows researchers to see which parts of the …

Mood and the Brain’s Clock

As we slowly move from summer to fall, it may be timely that the issue of Biological Psychiatry that arrived in the mail today is devoted to how the brain’s clock affects mood. It points to growing evidence that part of what drives mood cycles are disruptions in the brain’s daily (circadian) rhythms. It appears that people who are vulnerable …

Recovery from Disability

Sometimes we are privileged to help someone who is disabled due to bipolar or depression to recover and resume a full and happy life. In the beginning we face many questions about the process. Family members may have become very skeptical about the value of treatment. Or they may wonder if the disabled person is exaggerating his or her symptoms …

The Switch: Manic to Normal Mood

I have been thinking about what it is that we do in Psychiatry that is potentially helpful for people with bipolar and why that works. In many ways, the fulcrum of our work involves addressing the “switch process”. This refers to the way that moods can shift from manic to normal behavior, often quite suddenly. A recent discovery has been …

Suzanne Alexandra Black

I am excited to be working with Suzanne Alexandra Black again. Suzanne is a psychologist who is an expert in bipolar moods. She is a brilliant woman who has an active Skype practice with patients on several continents and she divides her time between Paris and New York. Over the course of the next couple of months I hope to have …

MoodRhythm: Beta Users Needed

One of our readers forwarded to us a story about a new application called MoodRhythm that was developed at Cornell University and won  the prestigious $100,000 Heritage Open mHealth Challenge. The full story is available here. The application, which is available as a beta, is available for both iPhones and Android smartphones (although how to download it may be a bit …

Treatment for Insomnia when Bipolar

Many people with bipolar disorder also experience symptoms of insomnia and sleep disturbance.  Researchers have been investigating treatments for this condition that do not involve medications. After numerous clinical trials, there has been significant success with CBT-I treatment. CBT-I is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia and it involves sleep restriction and stimulus control. The purpose of the first treatment is …

DSM5

In the next few days the American Psychiatric Association is meeting in San Francisco and will announce the latest version of its diagnostic and statistical manual: DSM5. Tom Insel, the Chief of the National Institute for Mental Health, created quite a stir last week by seeming to announce that the new diagnostic manual was an emperor with no clothes. The …

The Search for Meaning

When three people independently send you an article and urge you to read it, there is something very important contained in that article. A New York Times article by a woman with bipolar elicited that kind of response from people who know me. The article talks about the struggle of a woman who discovers that she has bipolar, struggles to …

Lowering Your Profile

This is the season (spring) when there is suddenly lots of energy around. I used to regularly run around a local lake. The run was peaceful and pleasant at all times of year except in the spring. In the spring the male geese suddenly felt that that had to make their presence known. They would flap their wings and attack …

Trojan Horse Medications

From time to time we are asked to review the care that people with cycling moods have received, trying to figure out, from a complicated story of medication changes and mood cycles, what to do to get someone out of a period of deep pain and dysfunction. A few years ago I did such a review on a young man …

Kindling

What do small sticks used to start a fire have to do with bipolar moods? Not much… Kindling in the context of this post refers to a phenomenon that is well documented in some people with seizure disorders and which may have relevance to some people with bipolar moods. Bob Post, who was for many years Chief of the Biological …

On the Borderline

I am writing a presentation for the UCSF Bipolar Program on the topic of the relationship between Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder and I thought I would jot down some of my thoughts in a quick post. Borderline personality disorder involves a “pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity” which begins by early adulthood …

Fish Oil Update

Since so many people with bipolar and depression take fish oil we thought we would pass on some information in a summary form from Consumer Labs. The full information is available if you subscribe. Consumer Labs is the only source of reliable information about supplements (the only place that does any testing) and if you take supplements we strongly encourage …

Creative Tension

I was inspired to write today’s post after watching a video sent out by a colleague as her “Valentine’s Day gift” to a group of mental health professionals interested  in women’s issues. The video was from the TED series (strongly recommended) and had to do with the challenge of having a long-term passionate relationship. The author was a delightful, French …