Dec 14 2008
Bipolar 3
Bipolar 3 doesn’t actually exist, at least not in strict medical parlance. But most people who work in the field say that there is definitely a third type of bipolar disorder. One in which you have a family history of bipolar disorder and you become hypomanic only after treatment with antidepressants for a major depressive episode. The problem is that although clinical experience demonstrates that treatment with antidepressants clearly stimulates mania in some people, the DSM-IV and other diagnostic tools all indicate that you don’t have bipolar disorder if your mania or hypomania is brought on by drugs or medications. In a study done in France, involved 48 psychiatric working in 15 different psychiatric centers with a total of nearly 500 patients with major depression. Of these patients, it turned out, nearly 40 percent had experienced one or more episodes of hypomania, and quarter of those were the result of antidepressant treatment (interesting what medicines that are suppose to help us can do).
In general, the patients who were hypomanic because of the antidepressants were very similar to those who were bipolar 2. The main difference, the physicians noted, was that the people with antidepressants-induced hypomania were more severely depressed, than the bipolar 2 patients. Noneless, the doctor who ran the study notes, they were just as likely to eventually be given lithium or another mood stabilizer as the bipolar 2 patients. The DSM-IV’s refusal to acknowledge these people as bipolar, the doctor and his colleagues write, “flies against experienced clinicians who make the decision to treat them the way they treat other bipolar spectrum patients.”
There are actually 4 types of bipolar disorder: bipolar I, bipolar II, cyclothymia, and bipolar NOS. There has been a lot of controversy about whether or not antidepressants (more specifically, SSRI’s) can induce bipolar disorder. They have yet to give a definitive answer, but there are many people who say they began having symptoms of bipolar disorder after taking those types of medications. It could also be that many people with bipolar disorder are initially misdiagnosed with depression and are then treated with antidepressants, only to find out later that they indeed have bipolar disorder. More studies are needed to decide which is the truth. I lean towards an initial misdiagnosis.