Blog Post 2
Miki Kowalski
HST 2000
10/10/17
Bipolar Disorder in the News
After doing some research online about bipolar disorder and what it has been in the news for recently, I stumbled upon this article by US News. In this article, it talks about how bipolar disorder relates to depression. People think that bipolar and depression is very similar, but they are not. Dr. Ellen Frank states that “I have seen a handful of patients, maybe three or four, who claimed they had never been depressed, but they didn’t recognize the depressive episodes.”
The NIMH says that there is not a single cause for bipolar disorder, but there are several things that they can take into account and consider a cause. One thing that they have noticed was that if a child has depression growing up, they are increasing their risk to get bipolar disorder later in life. That being said, parents need to pay very close attention to their kids, because no one wants their children growing up depressed and then having it lead to something more serious than that.
The main problem with depression and bipolar disorder are the diagnosing of the two. Since bipolar disorder is so hard to diagnose, doctors sometimes mistakenly diagnose it as major depression. People with bipolar disorder are also more vulnerable to other diseases like thyroid disease, migraines, and heart disease.
Treatment for bipolar disorder is tricky because everyone is different. It really involves a combination of medications and psychotherapy. Even though this is a lifelong illness, doctors are doing anything they can to try and figure out what causes this.
https://health.usnews.com/health-care/patient-advice/articles/2017-06-23/bipolar-disorder-how-does-it-relate-to-depression
https://health.usnews.com/health-care/patient-advice/articles/2017-06-23/bipolar-disorder-how-does-it-relate-to-depression
I knew that these were two different issues but I didn't know that one could lead into the other if not noticed. It's sad that doctors are misdiagnosing this issue, maybe this should lead them to have more training on the issue to prevent the misdiagnosing or the two problems.
ReplyDeleteIn my psychology class in high school we did a whole unit on different mental disorders, and bipolar was one of them. I found it was very interesting how it is so hard to diagnose because these people don't even know they have it or are misdiagnosed with just depression. This is very concerning because although the depression might get better due to the meds, the other side of bipolar is mania and that could get much worse. I didn't know that people with bipolar are more susceptible to having other disease like thyroid and heart disease.
ReplyDeleteIt's extremely scary how there are some doctors that misdiagnosed people for having depression when they do not, because it's just putting the patients health even more at risk. To prevent this issue from happening, there needs to be way where professionals could find something (like a sign or asymptom) that is in Bipolar disorder and not in depression; I'm pretty sure that there are professionals doing that already, but it's something that should still be brought up. I thought it was very interesting how depression could lead into a person having bipolar disorder. This is a very good article that you brought up, I'm now more aware of what to look for if I ever encounter a person who could be at risk for having bipolar disorder.
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