Bipolar disorder can't be cured and can be difficult to
diagnose. After it is identified, however, it often can be treated successfully.
Taking medicine for bipolar disorder is not like
periodically taking an aspirin for a headache or a decongestant for allergy.
Bipolar meds are swallowed several times a day on a daily basis, year after
year. Once I decided to skip a daily dose of a prescribed bipolar medicine, and
soon I became suicidal. After I resumed taking the pill I'd skipped, I had not
the slightest ghost of an attraction to suicide. One pill a day made the
difference between wanting to live and wanting to die.
Bipolar people who don't respond to medicine may find
electroconvulsive therapy or transcranial magnetic stimulation helpful. A
bipolar Ivy League professor has written that his career, his marriage, and his
life were saved by shock treatment. Today patients are anesthetized while the
electric shocks are administered. When they awake, they may have minor memory
problems that soon disappear, but the cruel fate of Jack Nicholson in the 1975
classic, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," is not an issue today.
One danger of being bipolar but undiagnosed is giving in to
an urge to self-medicate with alcohol. Alcoholics Anonymous is a resource, but
to get to the point where they can stop drinking, bipolar alcoholics may need
to be diagnosed and treated as bipolar first.
A psychiatrist can provide a bipolar diagnosis. For
treatment, psychiatric nurses, psychologists, and individual or family support
groups may also be involved. Even after bipolarity is diagnosed and treated, at
its most extreme, it may lead to periodic hospitalization for bipolar 1
patients.
There is no one-size-fits-all treatment or prescription for
bipolar disorder. A psychiatrist and patient may try several solutions before
hitting on one that works. As for medicine, Librium was the first to be widely
used. But a bipolar friend of mine was allergic to Librium before there were
other drugs available. She tried to commit suicide only once, and she was
discovered and saved, but daily living required a degree of valor that few of
us have to face. Luckily she had a keen joy in life, which may have been
related to bipolar hypomania.
Today there are dozens of medications used to treat bipolar
disorder. There are also a wide variety of side effects.
Meds include anticonvulsants like Depakote, probably because the part of the
brain that houses bipolarity is close to the area where seizures arise. One
such drug is quetiapine (Seroquel), the only one approved the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) for treating bipolar disorder.
Antidepressants
are sometimes prescribed for bipolar people, which seems like a no-brainer
given that depression is a symptom of bipolarity. But an antidepressant may go
too far and trigger a manic episode. Antidepressants may also cool your sex
drive. If sex is important you, I'd think a lowered sex drive might be
depressing and take you back to where to started. Other side effects might be
not only undesirable but also downright dangerous, so a patient should be
carefully monitored while on antidepressants.
The anti-anxiety medications Xanax,
Valium, and Librium are popular with people who are not bipolar as well as
those who are, probably because anxiety is a hallmark of our times. Drowsiness,
memory loss, and poorer muscle coordination are the down side.
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