Depression and Bipolar Disorders

American physiology and pfofessor of psychiatry kay Redifield amison is one the worlds foremost authorities on bipolar disorder She's spent her career researching lecturing and writing seminal books on the condition.

A condition that she also happens to have had her entire adult life.

In her memoir An Unquiet Mind Jamison details what it really means to be bipolar .she writes of not sleeping for days on end of feeling long periods of euphoria and filling whole notes books with her recing thoughts and grandiose ideas.while in these manic states ,she experienced a tremendously inflated sense of self -esteem and did implusive things that felt good at the time but had painful consequences like going on lavish shopping sprees engaging in promiscuous behavior racking up credit card debt,and emptying her bank accounts.but these episodes were following by emotional crashes . Crippled bouts of depression that sent her into a suicidal spiral At the age of 28 Jamison tried to kill herself by talking an overdose of Lithium lapsed into a coma,but thankfully emerged from it determined to find help through medication and therapy.

Through her research and writing Dr Jamison has pioneered our understanding of bipolar disorder , depression ,and the nexus of mental struggles that we now think of as mood disorders..

Mood Disorders

She's probably one of the best ambassadors we have for all those people who live successful productive lives with mental illness.just like the anxiety disorders.mood disorders are misunderstood . they're diluted by depiction of depression as something that can be treated with one day at a spa or description of people as manic depressive just because they were sad yesterday and aren't today.

As students of psychology our job is to understand what mood disorders really are how they manifest themselves and what might cause them and as you probably guessed this can be pretty tough terrain to explore,These discorders can take people from terrifying highs to pits of despair that seem all but bottomless..But in the between there's what Jamison has called A rich imaginative life..

A Rich imaginative life All mood possible by your moods.

All made possible by your moods we've been talking a lot about terms and concepts that mean something different than what you think they mean but this time the term Mood is not one of thoes.in a psychological context moods are pretty much exactly what you think they are Emotional states that are even more subjective and harder to define than the emotions themselves.and while psychologyists have defined about 10 basic emotionas,moods tend to fall into two broardly and infinitely variable categories.you got the good moods and the bad moods.

Probably the most important distinction between emotion. And mood is that moods are long.term emotional states rather than discrees fleeting feelings..

Mood Disorders

And mood Disorders which are characterized by emotional extremes and challenges in regulating mood tend to be longer term disturbances..

Depressive disorder

Bipolar Disorders the most prominent of which involves alternating between depression and mania.depression gas been called the common cold of psychological disorder which is not to say that is isn't serious,but its common and its pervasive and its the top reason people seek out mental health help.we've all felt down before obviously often in response to a sepcific loss a breakup or a lost job or the death of a loved one.and the fact is you probably should feel bad at times like those.it can actually be good for a mind and body to slow down.to help digest losses that you experience but in general sadness is temporary its when sadness and grief extend beyond the generally accepted social norms or plunge inti a depth that causes serious dysfunction that you find yourself in the territory of depressive disorders..

The DSM .5 our handy if super flawed users guide to psychological disorder officially diganoses a major depressive disorder when a patient has experienced at least five sings.of depression for more than two week..

Theses symptoms include not just depressed mood.but also significant weight or appetite loss or gain too much or too little sleep decreased interest in activities feeling worthless fatigued or lethargic difficulty concentrating or making decisions and recurrent thoughts of death or suicide.So while everyone experience sadness depression is a phycological as well aa phycological illness.it messes with your sleep and appetite and energy and neurotransmitter levels all interfering with the way your body runs itself.plus in keeping with our definition of psychological disorders,to be considered a true disorder this behavior needs to cause the person or others around them prolonged distress the feeling that something is really wrong..

Just as a person with a severe, generalized anxiety disorder may never want to leave the house a clinically depressed person often feels so hopeless and overwhelmed that they have trouble living a normal life and unlike the bipolar disorder tend to be all lows you've probably heard of music depression its the outdated term for bipolar disorder..

Manic depression

These include thouse classic dark lows of depression but also bouts of the opposite of extreme maina in more severe cases someone suffering from a bipolar disorder may filp back and forth between normal and depressive and manic phasese within a single day or week or month..

And a true manic episode doesn't just mean being energetic or happy its a period of intense restless but often optimistic hyperactivity in which your estimation of yourself and your abilities and your ideas can often get skewed like really really skewed.some patients experience mania only rarely but when they do,it can be destructive kay jamison has testified to that Once during manic episode she bought up a drug store's entire supply of snake-bite kits convinced of an imminent attention of rattlesnakes that only she knew was coming.in another she purchased 20 books by the penguin publishing house because she said its could be nice if the penguin could form a colony..

In other words bad judgment is common and it can get worse.full blown manic episode often end up in psychiatric hospitalization since the risk to self or others can become sever.when the highs eventually end they are often followed by dark periods of depression when left untreated suicide or suicide attempts are common another element of the disorder that Jamison herself can attest to.like so many things in psychology the cause of mood Disorders is often a combination of biological genetic psychological and environmental factors we know for example that mood disorders run in families genes matter and you are more likely to experience a bipolar or dispersive disorder if you have parents or siblings who suffer from them.studies have of identical twins show that if one twin has a bipolar disorder that the other has seven in ten chance of also being diagnosed regardless of whether they were raised together or apart..

And while a stressful life cant give you bipolar disorder it could trigger a manic or depressive episode in someone with a per existing condition or start a descent into a major. despressive episode in someone who never before had experienced depression in other words a person who leses a loved one could go from sad to depressed or slied into a bipolar episode but it couldn't because them to have the disorder yo begin with in the case of depressive disorders for most people ofter week l,months or even years,thire depression can end , hopefully with the return baseline healthy functioning.world-wide women tend to be diagnosed with major depression more often than men butmany psychologists think this is simply because women tend to seek treatment more its also possible that depression in men tends to manifest inself more in terms of anger and aggression,than as sadness and hopelessness..

This is just example if hiw depression is much more just being sad and thatthe characteristic lack of purpose and helplessness can manifest itself in a lot of different ways.looking at mood disorders from a neurological perspective,we see that depressed manic ,and average brains show very different brain activity in neural imaging scans as you might expect a brain in a depressed state slows down while a brain in a manic state shows a lot of increased activity making it hard for that person to calm down or focus or sleep..

Neurotransmitter chemistry

Our brains neurotransmitter chemistry also changes with thses different states for example,

Norepinephrine

Norepinephrine which usually increases arousal and focus is severely lacking in depressed brains but kind of off the charts during manic episodes .in fact drugs that seek to reduce mania in part do it by reducing norepinephrine levels ,you may have also heard about how .

Serotonin

Low Serotonin levels correlate with depressive states exercise like jogging or break dancing or whatever increases serotonin levels which is one reason exercise is often recommended to combat depression and most medications designed to treat depression seem to work by raising serotonin or norepinephrine levels.

And of course there's yet another way to look at things the social cognitive perspective.

Social cognitive perspective

Examines how our thinking and behavior influence desperssion.people with despression often view bad events through internal lens mind set that Influences how they're interpreded and how you explain events to ourself in a negative or poitive way,can really effect how you recover from them or don't Say you were humiliated in the lunch room when someone tripped you and chicken soup flew all over the place and you sat down on a brownie and it was just a bad day.A despressive mind might immediately start thinking that the humiliation will last forever that no one will ever let you live it down that its somehow your own fault and you can't ever do anything right...

That negative thinking learned helplessness self blame and over thinking can feed off itself and basically smother the joy out of the brain eventually creating a vicious self fulfilling cycle of negative thinking.

The good news is that tge cycle can be broken by getting help from a professional turning your attention outward ,doing more fun things and maybe even moving to a different environment but again that social cognitive prospective is just part of a much bigger puzzle positive thinking. Is important but its often inadequate on its own own when up against genetic or neurological factors so mood disorders are compilatied conditions and rarely are they eliminated with a single cure.

Instead they're often thing's you just live with and as Dr Jamison has show us,you can live well.