How to Diagnose Bipolar Disease

Video Transcript

"I'm Dr. David Thomas, I'm a practicing psychotherapist with the Whitford Thomas Group in Tampa, Florida to discuss how to diagnose bipolar disease. We refer to bipolar disease as bipolar disorder. Many years ago we referred to it as manic depression which some people even today believe is a much better description of the mood disturbance. But how we diagnose this is to determine at some degree what are the symptoms, the behavioral symptoms of the disorder. If we look at the mania side, the symptoms of mania tend to be mania being an elevated mood tend to be kind of an expansive or exaggerated sense of self. Often times kind of a grandiose position. Often times with mania we tend to see a very heightened level of energy. A decrease need for sleep. Also with mania you'll tend to see a lot of kind of high risk acting out behaviors be it drinking, indiscretions regarding sexual practices. On the depress side we diagnose the depression very much like we would in unipolar depression and what the depression being a kind of a sense of hopelessness and helplessness, the individual tends to have difficulty sleeping. Often times there's thoughts of suicide, often times with depression we're looking at fatigue, loss of energy, a sense that things are not going to get better, a sense of doom, a sense that they can't do anything about that. And you really have both depending upon how you diagnose is whether it be a bipolar 1 which often times has no depression, just the mania or hypomania piece, bipolar 2 which has at least one manic piece with various episodes of depression, cyclothymia which can be a combination both and then bipolar disorder not otherwise specified. I hope this information has been helpful regarding the diagnosis of bipolar disease, bipolar disorder. From Tampa, Florida, I'm Dr. David Thomas."