What Happened to My Bipolar Brain and How Do I Fix It?

The most troublesome statement in Goodwin and Jamison's Manic Depressive Illness may be this: "Complete symptomatic remission does not ensure functional recovery." This is no small problem. For some 30% to 60% of patients with bipolar disorder, simply treating their mood symptoms is not enough to help them return to a full life.

There’s a third pole that needs to be addressed for that to happen: cognitive symptoms. These often persist even when patients are euthymic, and they range from problems with memory and attention to more subtle deficits such as picking up on social cues and making wise decisions. 

Chris Aiken's article, Eight Ways to Improve Cognition in Bipolar Disorder, opens with these paragraphs. Ironically, what Aiken calls troublesome, I find immensely reassuring. My experiences are real!

What People with Depression Need to Hear

Depression is one tough condition. Contrary to those cheery ads on tv and friends who want you to get over it, it is not easy to recover. Doctors also, in their eagerness to get you to do something that will help, sometimes oversell their solutions.

Chris Aiken's recent article in Psychiatric Times presents a more helpful picture.

Five Things to Say to People with Depression

You can expect, and do deserve, a full recovery. Aiken's point is that people with depression have a hard time believing we will ever feel any differently. (This is true. Boy, is this true.) Nevertheless, chances are, we will feel better. There is a rub here however. Most people get to full recovery, not all. As a patient, I'd like to hear up front that even if it comes back, chances are that things will get better again. So many of us feel like failures when depression recurs, when actually both remission and recurrence are part of the natural course of the illness.

Major Depression and World Bipolar Day

Your diagnosis is major depression. So what does World Bipolar Day have to do with you?

I mean, what a relief to just have major depression, right? Isn't bipolar another level of crazy? Well. . .

First, a reality check. Whatever level of crazy you are now, you can call it whatever you want, your mental health struggles will not get worse if your diagnosis changes. Actually, you might get better. I'll get back to that.

New Year's Resolution - Eat Chocolate! Or Maybe Not...

Long time readers may know of my over-a-decade-long effort to get the sugar monkey off my back. I can report that I am reasonably  successful. I don't know if it has made an ongoing difference to my mood. But a shared dessert at a restaurant will get my arthritic shoulder burning. So I keep it up.

Or maybe I have taken it too far. It's all about costs and benefits, you know. And recent research suggests maybe I should lighten up, or rather, darken up.

Chris Aiken of Bipolar Not So Much fame, also Wake Forest University School of Medicine and The Carlat Psychiatry Report, says to my sugar fast, Not so fast. At least as far as dark chocolate goes.

Trading Symptom Relief for Side Effect Relief

Why do people stop taking their psych medication?

Psychiatrists spend a lot of time on this question. They used to call it noncompliance. Then they figured out that the word fed the power struggle between doctor and patient. Now they call it nonadherence. Me, I am not convinced that the word change reflects an attitude shift on doctors' parts, i.e., that they have changed their attitudes toward noncompliant patients, have abandoned the power struggle themselves, and instead want to partner with their patients. I suspect the word change is a cosmetic shift designed to change the patient's attitude.

Psychiatric Times regularly publishes articles on why patients don't take their meds and best practices for improving adherence. Suboptimal adherence is pervasive among individuals with chronic health conditions, including psychiatric disorders... However, many mental health practitioners ascribe nonadherence to the mental illness itself.

Got Bipolar 2? Chris Aiken Can Help

If you want to know best practices for treating bipolar, "bipolar not so much," recurrent depression, "more than depression," "something-about-this-depression-treatment-just-isn't-working," read  Chris Aiken.

When I needed a subtitle for my book, I tried really hard to sell my publisher on What if it's more than depression? - a subtle reference to Bipolar Not So Much by Aiken and Jim Phelps, who is another of my mental health go-to resources. I flatter myself that Prozac Monologues is the companion piece, written from the other side of the prescription pad. The publisher had something else in mind, but if you find one book useful, you will like the other.

When my new nurse practitioner talked me into a chart review by the cookie cutter psychiatrist employed by the practice, the recommendation came back, Abilify and Zoloft. I said, No thanks, and sent her an article by Aiken. I hope it helps my NP get over her Free-Range Bipolar on Aisle 2 (i.e., non-medicated) panic before my next appointment. Aiken reports that Social Rhythms Therapy (my lifeline for years) can be as effective as medication, without the sedating effects that would have ended my writing career. Not to mention most other reasons to get up in the morning. Or even capacity to get up in the morning.

Bipolar, Not So Much - A Review

Recurrent depression, treatment-resistant depression, depression with mixed features, cyclothymic disorder -- if your file at the doctor's office is coded for any of these, my heart goes out to you. Chances are you have taken a number of turns around the antidepressant not-so-merry-go-round. I call it "The Chemistry Experiment," and you are the test tube.

Chris Aiken and James Phelps have written the book for you. Bipolar, Not So Much: Understanding Your Mood Swings and Depression introduces the reader to the Bipolar Spectrum. No, they are not talking about the movie version of bipolar, throwing furniture out the window, driving the car into the river... They mean the vast ground between that and your basic depression. They mean depression - with something more.

The authors use a conversational style, speaking directly to the reader and skipping the jargon. They begin by explaining the spectrum. They don't ask the question the way the DSM frames it, Does this person have bipolar? Rather, their question is, How much bipolar does this person have?

Like this:

You won't find the spectrum in the DSM, the manual of diagnoses. The DSM’s symptom silos are designed to put you in one slot or another. The silos came into existence in the 1960s. The spectrum approach is much preferred by the acknowledged experts in bipolar, starting with Goodwin and Jamison who also prefer the name manic depression. But in the recent revision,there was huge resistance to making the change back to the earlier understanding of the disorder. Symptom lists with their precise cut off points seem so tidy and are easier to code. So they remain in the DSM-5, and people like Aiken and Phelps write books to try to inform people who don't know anything more about bipolar than the damn lists. But I digress...

Aiken and Phelps take the approach that you will get the best recovery if you know what is actually going on. So first they thoroughly ground the reader in the spectrum concept, and include the diagnostic and predictive instruments that all the docs can access, but usually don't take the time to use. Damn, I am digressing again...

Next they spend a lot of time on lifestyle changes and other nonpharmocological treatment measures. The thing is, the meds were all developed and work best for the folk on the far ends of that spectrum. Which you already know if you are somewhere in the middle, because they don’t work so well for you, which is how you became a Chemistry Experiment. 

Actually, even if you are clearly unipolar or clearly bipolar 1, Aiken and Phelps have good advice for you regarding sleep, diet, exercise, supplements, and the rest. You’re just going to do better if you don’t ask the meds to do all the work. Mood disorders are more complicated than that mythological chemical imbalance. 

The book's third section is a thorough listing and discussion of all the meds. They have their favorites which may be different from your doctor’s, because they don’t talk to drug reps nor read the ads. They read (and do) the research. Are you getting the sense that I have an agenda here?

Bipolar, Not So Much is the essential resource for for anybody who has depression and maybe something more. It is backed up by Phelp's excellent website PsychEducation.org. It is a humane book by humane doctors who listen and learn from their patients. What a concept, huh? Their dedication page tells the tale:

To our patients. You showed us what life is like in the mood spectrum, and we hope we got it right, or at least close, in this book.

flair from Facebook.com

book cover from Amazon.com

bipolar spectrum graphic from PsychEducation.com.