Treatment for Bipolar Disorder Symptoms

Video Transcript

"I'm Dr. David Thomas. I'm a practicing psychotherapist with the Whitford Thomas Group in Tampa, Florida, here to discuss treatment for bipolar disorder symptoms. Treating bipolar disorder symptoms, we're looking at two types of regimes, certainly medication as well as cognitive behavior psychotherapy. Medication, you want to work with your physician but preferably a psychiatrist, since that's their expertise, dealing with mental and nervous disorders. So, you have the medication regime, but you also have the cognitive behavior, which is to teach people the thinking component that drives depression as well as anxiety. When we're looking at bipolar disorder, often times we ask the question, "What creates bipolar disorder?" And with bipolar disorder, often times its onset is established as a result of some response to an interpersonal life event or an achievement life event. For example, interpersonal life event may be the death of a close friend, a new love interest. Achievement could be that you just recently got accepted in some prestigious graduate school or that you lost a job. So, certainly, the antecedent, the precursor for oftentimes the episode of mania or depression is some stressor. And so the cognitive behavior piece, which is certainly emphasizing the thinking that drives depression, the thinking that drives mood, stays an important piece. When we're dealing with bipolar disorder, remember there's two pieces. It's a mood disorder, so it's an elevated mood which is the mania. Oftentimes the mania is not detected because it's at lower levels and we call that hypomania, which is just a less severe form of mania. A lot of creativity often occurs from a hypomanic state. That's why a lot of what you'd consider famous folks, creative folks, accomplished folks, are often in kind of a hypo state. Again, mood disorder, bipolar disorder -- it's important to have medicine as well as therapy. I hope this information has been helpful to you about bipolar disorder. From Tampa, Florida, I'm Dr. David Thomas."