Getting My Brain Back -- I'm Still Excited by BDNF

Learning has been fundamental to my mental health recovery. It started with this blog itself. I wanted to know What the hell happened to my brain?!!! So I read the research and used ProzacMonologues.com to keep track of my notes.

For a while I added piano to my recovery regimen. Not for music therapy, but for brain development. Okay, I didn't keep at it. I can sort of play Desperado. But it did get me a few more miles down the road.

Lately I am learning a new language. Five minutes a day of Irish on Duolingo -- I don't expect to be fluent any time this decade. I don't need to be fluent. For those five minutes a day, I am building my brain.

Which is always a good thing.

I did a search in my blog for BDNF. And found something I wrote in 2011, right after I wrote that review of Ellen Frank's Treating Bipolar Disorder. Now you, kind reader, have no idea the struggle it took back then to write these paragraphs. I am proud of it both for the accomplishment and for the content itself. I present it to you again:

Getting My Brain Back -- In Praise of BDNF

Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy: Good, Bad, and Ugly (Mostly Good)

Following #bipolar on Twitter for the last few years, I am often dismayed. So many people seem to spend so much time struggling with their medications and so little time focused on anything else that could help.

Don't get me wrong. Medication is an important tool for managing bipolar disorder. But it can't do the whole job. Education and life style changes are crucial for getting off the roller coaster of constant med adjustments to address the episode du jour.

I decided it was time to revisit my 2011 review of Ellen Frank's Treating Bipolar Disorder. It was a four-part review. The last three posts describe the treatment itself, Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy, IPSRT.

Part I laid the educational foundation, describing the relationship between circadian rhythms (our interior physiological clocks) and mood disorders.

Part II outlined Frank's Social Zeitgeber Theory and the treatment that proceeds logically from it, a process of establishing regular daily rhythms that set our interior clocks and keep them running on time. (Zeitgeber means timekeeper.)

Part III explained how work on interpersonal issues helps people reduce stressors and prevent disruptions to their social rhythms.

This last post will pull together my appreciation, my reservations and my hopes for future directions.

Social Zeitgeber Theory

How Does Interpersonal Therapy Help People with Bipolar Disorder?

Ellen Frank - Treating Bipolar Disorder, Part 3

Lately I have been reposting my 2011 review of Treating Bipolar Disorder by Ellen Frank. It was originally recommended to me by a friend who was researching hypomania. Part I described the basis of Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy (IPSRT) in circadian rhythms that control the many physiological symptoms of mood disorders. Part II outlined the Social Zeitgeber Theory and described the early stages of the therapy process, history taking and stabilizing social rhythms. Today I pick up with the later stages, interpersonal therapy and maintenance.

Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy came to Ellen Frank in an epiphany on her birthday, July 14, 1990. Personally, I like that. I especially like that it was the day that she participated in a conference for people with bipolar, and listened to them.

Frank and her colleagues were already using interpersonal therapy for people with recurrent unipolar depression. Their theory was that certain life events, particularly losses could result in lost social zeitgebers, (timekeepers), with subsequent disruption of circadian rhythms, leading to eventual relapse into another episode of depression.

IPSRT took up from there as an adaptation specifically for people with bipolar disorder, integrating the work on issues (as in, you've got issues) with greater focus on behavioral changes to achieve and maintain daily rhythms, time of rising, time of first human contact, work, main meal, etc. The purpose of IPSRT is to help people achieve stability and then to avoid relapses into either depression or mania/hypomania.

Why Do People Relapse?

How the Social Zeitgeber Theory Works, for Good or Ill - IPSRT

This -- this system is the gift I wish I could give to the people I meet on Twitter who struggle with their bipolar, who are in endless rounds of medication adjustments and medication failures and medication despair. Medication isn't the only thing you can do. I'm not saying quit your meds. I'm saying, add social rhythms therapy. Originally posted in 2011:

Ellen Frank - Treating Bipolar Disorder, Part 2

So you have bipolar. You know you have bipolar. You are way past the denial stage. You are into the pulling out your hair, screaming with frustration stage. Or maybe moved on to despair stage. Because:

1. The medication sucks.
2. You keep getting sick again anyway.

But contrary to what everybody has been telling you, medication is not the only thing that works. It may be essential to your recovery and continued functioning. But you can do better if you do more. From my last post:

IPSRT [Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy] is one of three psychotherapies tested by the National Institute on Mental Health in its recent major study of best practices for treatment of bipolar disorder. The Systematic Treatment Enhancement Program for Bipolar Disorder, STEP-BD discovered that Patients taking medications to treat bipolar disorder are more likely to get well faster and stay well if they receive intensive psychotherapy.

Do I have your attention? Today we continue with Ellen Frank's Treating Bipolar Disorder, in which she describes this therapy of her invention.

What Happens In IPSRT

Do Your Meds Work? There's More You Can Do to Treat Bipolar

Ellen Frank: Treating Bipolar Disorder - A Review

Ellen Frank changed my life. When I was diagnosed on the bipolar spectrum, and hadn't found a medication regime that I could tolerate, her Interpersonal and Social Rhythms Therapy gave me a way to get a handle on my wildly fluctuating condition.

She and I corresponded in 2011, as I was writing a four-part review of her book and her therapy. I published with her assurance that I got it right.

I was over the moon when she agreed to endorse Prozac Monologues: A Voice from the Edge. She wrote:

Brilliantly written, engaging from the first page, Prozac Monologues is a bit like a great evening at a first-rate comedy club…except that it is deadly serious.  Goodfellow’s painful and all too common journey to finding the right treatment for her bipolar disorder points her to the ultimate realization that doing well with this illness requires the right medication, the right psychotherapy, and the specific lifestyle modifications that support wellness.

Ellen Frank, Ph.D.Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, 

University of Pittsburg School of Medicine

Pretty cool, huh! She even wrote privately to her listserv to recommend it.

So many people I read on Twitter struggle to manage their bipolar disorder. I figure it's time to bring this four part series out again. So here is Part 1 - from April 4, 2011.

Medication And Mental Illness

Medication for mental illness is just like medication for anything else. It works better when you don't ask it to do all the work itself.

In the case of bipolar, once lithium and the chemical imbalance theory came along, the thinking was that medication was the only thing that worked. Therapy by itself certainly didn't. I wonder if therapists, worn out by their bipolar patients, were simply relieved to believe that medication was the only thing that worked. I wonder if therapists today, worn out by their recurrent depression patients, are secretly relieved to terminate when the diagnosis changes to bipolar, because medication is the only thing that works.

Frankly, there is a lot of wishful thinking out there in pharmacotherapy land. If only our brains were a chemical stew and the illnesses of the brain could be treated by adjusting the recipe. If only.

But people with mental illness, especially people with bipolar, can't afford the wishful thinking behind the better living through chemistry fantasy. Sometimes the medications do work. But not as well nor as often as your doctor would like to think.

I have a friend who is a psychiatrist. He challenges his colleagues who keep trying to solve this noncompliance issue, to get their patients to comply. He reminds them, if the medication (antidepressants, in this example) worked for 40% of those who took it in the trial, and the placebo worked for 30%, that means only one out of ten people benefit from the medication itself. So what's the big deal about nine who quit?

He says they just look at him funny.

Treating Bipolar Disorder by Ellen Frank

This same friend, God bless him, loaned me a book about a psychotherapy designed specifically for bipolar disorder titled, appropriately enough, Treating Bipolar Disorder. The author Ellen Frank, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and director of the Depression and Manic Depression Prevention program at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, and her colleagues invented Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy (IPSRT), a kind of mash-up between talk therapy and regulating circadian rhythms.  It gets my next few posts.

In A Nutshell... 

IPSRT [is] a treatment that seeks to improve outcomes that are usually obtained with pharmacotherapy alone for patients suffering from bipolar I disorder by integrating efforts to regularize their social rhythms (in the hope of protecting their circadian rhythms from disruption) with efforts to improve the quality of their interpersonal relationships and social role functioning.

Five Good Books I Recommend for World Bipolar Day

Knowledge is the key to taming this beast we call bipolar disorder. The more you know about what is happening inside that beautiful brain of yours, the better you can avoid letting it bite you in the butt.

Alas, many people with bipolar think their doctors will tell them what they need to know. Most of the psychiatrists I have seen gave me an abbreviated (and sometimes disingenuous) description for potential side effects of the pills they prescribed. And that's it.

How do I actually live with this beast? Take my meds. What will it mean for my life? Not so much as a pamphlet.

Psychoeducation for bipolar disorder has been shown to reduce recurrence of depressive, manic, and mixed episodes, all three, and to reduce hospitalization, as well. It includes information about the biological roots of the disorder, the rationale for medication, other treatment options, early warning signs of episodes, and common triggers. It aims to improve adherence to treatment plans. It usually is offered in a group setting.

It isn't offered often.

Are You Asking Your Meds to do All the Work?

Where is my magic pill? They say it takes a while to find the right medication, you just have to stick with it.

But for how long? How many chemistry experiments? When? WHEN will my bipolar get fixed?

This was me, resisting therapy, resisting exercise, resisting every other suggestion my doctor made. Alas, here are the pills that finally did the trick:

Pills are not enough.

Circadian Rhythms and Fixing Bipolar's Wonky Clock

When nothing else worked, Social Rhythms Therapy got my bipolar under control. That's why Ellen Frank is my mental health hero. She invented it.

A few years ago, I spent four weeks summarizing Frank's book, Treating Bipolar Disorder: A Clinician's Guide to Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy. My goal was to create a patient's guide. Here is the link to Part Four. It includes links to the earlier posts.

Frank describes Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy like this: IPSRT [is] a treatment that seeks to improve outcomes that are usually obtained with pharmacotherapy alone for patients suffering from bipolar I disorder by integrating efforts to regularize their social rhythms (in the hope of protecting their circadian rhythms from disruption) with efforts to improve the quality of their interpersonal relationships and social role functioning.

Circadian rhythms are at the core of IPSRT. People with bipolar have difficulty maintaining the stability of our circadian rhythms, because our internal clocks, governing everything from sleep cycles to blood sugar levels to body temperature are, well, wonky.

Giving Thanks for Ellen Frank

If you can manage one, just one self-care exercise for bipolar, make it a regular sleep schedule. This week I am thankful I found Ellen Frank and IPSRT, Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy.

IPSRT in a nutshell: people with bipolar have a wonky internal clock. The hormones that regulate everything from when we are alert to when we are hungry to when we are cold are governed by an internal clock. When that clock sproings a spring, so do we. Bipolar is like jet lag on a daily basis.

There are a number of events that set and reset the clock throughout the day. If you have a wonky clock, you can reduce the damage it does by making sure these events happen the same time every day. That is the Social Rhythms part. The Interpersonal part is plain old therapy, focussing on whatever issues prevent you from protecting your clock.

Keeping this clock set correctly is the single most effective strategy for maintaining good sleep patterns. And sleep patterns are almost the whole show. Disruptions cause cascading effects: increased inflammation, cognitive difficulties, irritability, emotional lability, depression, hypomania, mania, all three, weight gain... Somebody has probably written the book. I will write the testimonial, that when my sleep is in order, so am I. Ellen Frank focussed my attention on that #1 strategy. When the meds didn't work, she saved my butt.

Several years ago, I wrote the more detailed version of IPSRT in a review of Frank's Treating Bipolar Disorder, three posts to explain the theory and one summary review. So here it is reposted, with links to the earlier posts within it. 

Treating Bipolar Disorder Part IV -- Summing Up

May 4, 2011

Intending to review Ellen Frank's Treating Bipolar Disorder,  I spent most of April describing the treatment itself, Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy, IPSRT.

Part I laid the foundation in work done on the relationship between circadian rhythms (our interior physiological clocks) and mood disorders.

Part II outlined Frank's Social Zeitgeber Theory and the treatment that proceeds logically from it, a process of establishing regular daily rhythms that set our interior clocks and keep them running on time.  (Zeitgeber means timekeeper.)

Part III explained how work on interpersonal issues helps people reduce stressors and prevent disruptions to their social rhythms.

This last post will pull together my appreciation, my reservations and my hopes for future directions.

Social Zeitgeber Theory

Frank builds IPSRT on the theory that people with bipolar are more vulnerable than others to disruptions in our circadian rhythms.  When our interior clocks get screwed up, we do, too.  Daily events, like getting up at a certain time, seeing people, going to work, set our circadian rhythms.  The core of the therapy is to help keep our rhythms regular.

The best brilliant part of Treating Bipolar Disorder is this theory.

A good theory accounts for as much of the data as possible, and then provides a way to solve problems.

The old theory is bipolar is a chemical imbalance in the brain.  The advantages of the old theory is that it is simple, it suggests a way to solve the problem, and it is earning the pharmaceutical companies billions and billions of dollars.  The disadvantages are that decades after it was first offered, it has offered false hope and subsequent despair to millions of sufferers, focused blame on those who won't take the drugs that make them sick and/or don't work, and for a majority of people who receive the best pharmacotherapy possible, simply failed to fix the problem.  It also neglects a lot of data.

The chemical imbalance theory comes from the data of clinical experiments -- that symptoms go away when you change the chemical stew.  Or at least, they go away enough to get FDA approval for marketing claims.  It does explain a piece of the puzzle.

But another set of data has to do with what was going on before the symptoms developed.  Frank and company turn to circadian rhythms to account for how the chemical imbalance developed.  And here there is a wealth of data.  For example, study of circadian rhythms reveals that lack of sleep causes depression as often as it is caused by depression.  This suggests a whole other way to solve problems.

Treating Bipolar Disorder documents this evidence in support of the theory.  Most of the book then describes the therapy that derives from the theory.

People With Bipolar Who Are Doing Well

The Social Zeitgeber Theory accounts for the data of those with bipolar disorder who are managing their symptoms, working, thriving over the long haul.  There are almost no studies done from this angle -- what people are doing to stay well.  John McManamy reports on two of these studies at mcmanweb.com.  Healthy lifestyle is the top strategy for these people, particularly maintaining good sleep.  Most, 85% take medication, but do not make medication the center of their self-care.  None rely entirely on medication to stay healthy.

Medication, Medication, Medication

My chief reservation about the book has to do with its assumptions about medication.

Let me put it this way.  It is a bold move to list the uses of specific medications in a hard copy printed published book.  Chances are that such a book will report positively on a medication for which the manufacturer then settles a class action suit in the same year as publication.  Zyprexa/olazapine is just one example of how quickly the chapter's information became debatable and/or dated.

Frank assumes that IPSRT is an add-on to pharmacotherapy.  She notes that lithium, the miracle drug that was supposed to have solved the problem of bipolar has turned out not to have done so in near as many cases as people think.  She acknowledges that there are problems with side effects and efficacy for anything that is currently in use.  But just barely.

Unfortunately, it is only a minority of patients with bipolar disorder who can comfortably take the medications that seem to control the symptoms of the illness and who are willing to submit to this control.  Especially early in the course of the illness, before it has wrought complete havoc in the patient's life, there is denial that there is anything permanently wrong and a longing for the highs that the medications take away.

Yup.  There it is.  Ellen Frank, too.  They miss their highs.  I won't go there right now.  It's just too tiresome.  But stay tuned...

Frank continues the clinicians' tradition of oversell.  She considers whether a clinician should refuse to work with a person who has bipolar I and does not take medication.  Her recommendation is that the work might proceed anyway, with the goal of revisiting the issue at every opportunity until the patient finally does take meds,and holding open the possibility that treatment may be terminated if the clinician concludes that he/she cannot accept responsibility for somebody who is not on meds.

Okay, on a positive note, Frank pays more attention to side effects than other clinicians, repeatedly urging that the therapist and prescribing clinician work in partnership, and that medication problems be addressed.

On a very positive note, Frank spends a lot of ink on the issue that people with bipolar I or II spend way more time depressed than manic and hypomanic.  And our depressions are far and away the part of the illness that disables us.

Can We Ever Crack This Medication Nut?

This medication debate never seems to get anywhere.  Like abortion or the Palestinian issue in US politics, nuance is not allowed.  You're either pro-med or anti-psychiatry.  And I can feel myself drawn into the blogosphere's quicksand.  So let me do the down and dirty on Frank's position and get out of here.

Frank's assumption that everybody who has bipolar I and not on meds is a trainwreck waiting to happen -- maybe that is a necessary evil to maintain her professional credibility; maybe more of the usual professional wishful thinking: I call it disappointing.

Frank's repetition of the old they miss their highs thing: I call it tiresome.



Frank's concern to take side effects seriously and her criticism of the standard practice of medicating people with bipolar into a permanent state of mild depression, treating anything approaching a normal feel-good state as a danger sign of impending mania: I call that refreshing. 

Clinical Language Alert

I have spent the last several years reading books and articles written not for me, but about me.  It is a perilous business.  Prozac Monologue readers occasionally are on the receiving end of my efforts to manage the consequences of this endeavor.  It is getting less perilous, as I learn some skills, the first of which is simply to acknowledge the intended audience.  So...

Treating Bipolar Disorder is written for clinicians and about people with bipolar.  I am not a clinician; I am a person with bipolar.  Therefore, Treating Bipolar Disorder is not for me; it is about me.

If you are like me, you need to take this into account when reading this book.

Having said that, this book is less perilous than others.

Yes, there are a couple bumps in the road: the bipolar temperament, the attitude of entitlement and they miss their highs.  For the record, Frank never uses those exact words.  Her exact words are above.

On the other hand, this book is exceptional in its tone of respect and genuine partnership between clinician and patient.  Absolutely exceptional.  Props to Ellen Frank.

The Future Of IPSRT

Like I said, this book was written for clinicians, who are addressed directly.  It was not written for people who have bipolar disorder, nor for a general audience.  There is no book, no pamphlet, no article, no website, no youtube that describes IPSRT for a general audience.  Prozac Monologues is as close as you get.  Not enough for a do-it-yourself-er.  But a start.

At this point, getting access to this therapy would be a trick.  If you use one of those Find a Therapist websites and actually do find one in your area whose interests include bipolar, you are still likely to get the response I got, The way to treat bipolar is with medication.

Frank and company keep track of those they have trained.  She says maybe she should develop a website.  A lot of people think maybe they should develop a website.  Most of them have many other things to do.  I wouldn't hold my breath.  I would write her directly and ask.  And then come up with a do-it-yourself strategy.  I have one outlined below.

Frank has the support of NIMH's STEP-BD study giving IPSRT the magic label of evidence-based.  So she has a therapy, a book, a training.  And 5,700,000 people who could benefit from this treatment.  She needs to develop the market for her training the same way pharmaceutical companies develop their markets -- go directly to us 5,700,000 people with bipolar.

There's a whole world of people out here who get our mental health care from Facebook friends and [Name Your Diagnosis and/or Treatment] for Dummies.  We need an IPSRT for Dummies.  We need a workbook.  Once we get started, we'll ask for help, and our care providers might get interested.

Here is my story: The meds don't work.  I have been stalled in Cognitive Therapy for some co-morbid trauma issues.  I don't have the capacity to interview a bunch of therapists who might deal with my bipolar, even if I could find them.  I lose my voice when I talk with therapists -- back to those trauma issues.  So I went back to my CBT therapist.  We are renegotiating to do more interpersonal work and I am experimenting on my own SRT/Mood Chart.  I will do the SRT part on my own.  My therapist and I can talk about my grief for the formerly healthy self.

You have to really have it together to do therapy this way.  I am not starting from a position of crisis.  I have good insurance and a lot of resources.  My wife tells me, if I have lost half of my cognitive functioning, that still makes me smarter than 80% of the people in the room.

So this might work for me and maybe another 100,000 high functioners out there.  5,600,000 more to go.

On July 14, 1990 Ellen Frank knew with absolute certainty that [she] needed to dedicate the next decade of [her] life to doing better by these patients and family members.  It was a decade well spent.  And then another.  I hope she keeps going into the third.

Last Words

If you are a person living with bipolar disorder, cut the author a break for the inevitable mental health provider mentality.  The medication issue is a minor, minor piece of an otherwise helpful, hopeful book.

Treating Bipolar Disorder offers hope.  Read it.  Talk to your therapist about it.  Get yourself a schedule that includes enough sleep at a regular time each day.  Talk with your therapist about whatever keeps you from doing that.

If you are a therapist, read this book.  Give its techniques a try.  If they help somebody, don't you need some CEU's?

If you are a doctor, read this book.  Stop promising more from meds than meds can deliver.  There is more help out there for your patients.  Help us find it.

If you are Ellen Frank, get this stuff out to those of us who can't find or afford a therapist whom you have trained.  And God bless you.

photo of clockworks by HNH and used under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

flair from facebook

caution sign by RTCNCA and used under the GNU Free Documentation License,

The Power of Apology

First, a nod to our excrutiatingly polite neighbors to the north, on the Power of Apology from Scott Stratton:

Next, inspired by Scott and in honor of Magna Carta Day - a rerun of last year's Entitled to an Apology?

Perhaps because a central feature of both hypomania and depression is irritability, and because a characteristic of the "bipolar temperament" is a certain tendency toward an attitude of entitlement, interpersonal disputes tend to be common in this patient population. -- Ellen Frank, Treating Bipolar Disorder

More on Mood Charts

This is my personalized mood chart.

You can find a larger and clearer image here. It was inspired by the one my mental health insurance provider sent me when I began taking mood stabilizers. Last week I described how their chart works and how people with mood disorders benefit from using any of the great variety out there.

Cigna's chart primarily tracks mood. Using theirs, I learned that lamotrigine made a difference to the course of my symptoms. After years of inappropriate prescriptions of antidepressants, I had moved to rapid cycling. No, rapid cycling means several cycles in a year. More like, I was spinning, from the depths of depression to raging agitation within each week, week after week. Lamotrigine did modify that pattern. It stretched the cycles, down from four to two a month. By recording the pattern, eventually I concluded, and I had the evidence to support it to my doctor, that the costs of the medication (dizziness, fourteen hours of sleep and grogginess a day, losing words) outweighed the benefits.

More Than Mood

But Cigna's chart was missing vital information. Mood dysregulation was only part of my experience. It was the agitation, sense of urgency, poor concentration, lack of sleep that put me on the disability roles. And, I began to suspect, these disturbances in energy levels were driving my suicidal thoughts as much as my depression was.

Neuroscience of Meaningful Work

Fourteen years ago, I was offered a new job, Missioner for Ministry Development.  What's that?  Sometimes I said, I consult with organizations undergoing paradigm shift.  Other times I said, I do what Paul did.  Depended on the audience.

The details don't matter.  What does matter is that I got up every single morning rejoicing at what I felt privileged to do that day.  I considered it the job I was born to do.

Well, yes and no.  It combined my burning passion for advocacy, my deep appreciation of small congregations, and my abiding love for the highways and byways of Iowa, Beautiful Land, as the native inhabitants called it.

On the other hand, it gave me intense fourteen hour work days, conflict with long time friends, people across the state who piled their hopes, dreams and desperations on my back and the resistance of those who value certain aspects of an institution that others can no longer afford.  When we mixed all that with second generation antidepressants -- Keep trying, the doctors and my therapist said -- my bipolar II went into hyperdrive.  I was both madly productive and plain old mad.  It was beautiful.  It was ugly.  It didn't last.

Ellen Frank says that people with bipolar need to deal with grief for the lost healthy self.  It's one of the interpersonal issues that sabotage our adherence to the regimen required to maintain recovery.

Entitled to an Apology?

Perhaps because a central feature of both hypomania and depression is irritability, and because a characteristic of the "bipolar temperament" is a certain tendency toward an attitude of entitlement, interpersonal disputes tend to be common in this patient population. -- Ellen Frank, Treating Bipolar Disorder

Frank goes on to explain how this attitude of entitlement plays out in the clinical setting.  Unlike the usually self-effacing patient with Major Depressive Disorder, grateful for any scrap of attention, people with bipolar get irritated at imagined slights, such as when the therapist cancels an appointment, or is late.  Sometimes, the only way the therapist can maintain the therapeutic relationship is to go ahead and apologize for these imagined slights.

Yup, stick that fork in the 220 volt socket again.

The Therapeutic Alliance - Or Not

My therapist asked, Does writing your blog help you overcome your trust issues with psychiatry?

Hah!  So she doesn't read my blog.

Not that I think she should.  Of all the many things about which I have strong opinions, whether care providers should google their patients is not one of them.  They can have that discussion among themselves.

Trust My Psychiatrist?

But her question started me thinking.  I trust my own psychiatrist.  How did that happen?  I tucked that question away for a future blog.

Then last September David Mintz wrote about Psychodynamic Psychopharmacology.  Psychodynamic psychopharmacology explicitly acknowledges and addresses the central role of meaning and interpersonal factors in pharmacological treatment.

One particular paragraph brought my therapist's question and my tucked away post back to mind:

The Prescriber and the Placebo Effect

An analysis of the data from a large, NIMH-funded, multicenter, placebo-controlled trial of the treatment of depression found a provocative treater x medication effect. While the most effective prescribers who provided active drug (antidepressant) had the best results, it was also true that the most effective one-third of prescribers had better outcomes with placebos than the least effective one-third of prescribers had with active drug. This suggests that how the doctor prescribes is actually more important than what the doctor prescribes!

Treating Bipolar Disorder Part IV -- Summing Up

Intending to review Ellen Frank's Treating Bipolar Disorder, I spent most of April describing the treatment itself, Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy, IPSRT.

Part I laid the foundation in work done on the relationship between circadian rhythms (our interior physiological clocks) and mood disorders.

Part II outlined Frank's Social Zeitgeber Theory and the treatment that proceeds logically from it, a process of establishing regular daily rhythms that set our interior clocks and keep them running on time. (Zeitgeber means timekeeper.)

Part III explained how work on interpersonal issues helps people reduce stressors and prevent disruptions to their social rhythms.

This last post will pull together my appreciation, my reservations and my hopes for future directions.

Social Zeitgeber Theory

Treating Bipolar Disorder Part III -- The Interpersonal Therapy Part

Lately I have been reviewing Treating Bipolar Disorder by Ellen Frank -- the recommendation of a friend who is researching hypomania. Part I described the basis of Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy (IPSRT) in circadian rhythms that control the many physiological symptoms of mood disorders. Part II outlined the Social Zeitgeber Theory and described the early stages of the therapy process, history taking and stabilizing social rhythms. Today I pick up with the later stages, interpersonal therapy and maintenance.

Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy came to Ellen Frank in an epiphany on her birthday, July 14, 1990. Personally, I like that. I especially like that it was the day that she participated in a conference for people with bipolar, and listened to them.

Frank and her colleagues were already using interpersonal therapy for people with recurrent unipolar depression. Their theory was that certain life events, particularly losses could result in lost social zeitgebers, (timekeepers), with subsequent disruption of circadian rhythms, leading to eventual relapse into another episode of depression.

IPSRT took up from there as an adaptation specifically for people with bipolar disorder, integrating the work on issues (as in, you've got issues) with greater focus on behavioral changes to achieve and maintain daily rhythms, time of rising, time of first human contact, work, main meal, etc. The purpose of IPSRT is to help people achieve stability and then to avoid relapses into either depression or mania/hypomania. 

Why Do People Relapse?

Treating Bipolar Disorder Part II -- The Social Zeitgeber Theory in Action

So you have bipolar.  You know you have bipolar.  You are way past the denial stage.  You are into the pulling out your hair, screaming with frustration stage.  Or maybe moved on to despair stage.  Because:

1. The medication sucks.
2. You keep getting sick again anyway.
   

But contrary to what everybody has been telling you, medication is not the only thing that works.  It may be essential to your recovery and continued functioning.  But you can do better if you do more.  From my last post:

IPSRT [Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy] is one of three psychotherapies tested by the National Institute on Mental Health in its recent major study of best practices for treatment of bipolar disorder.  The Systematic Treatment Enhancement Program for Bipolar Disorder, STEP-BD discovered that Patients taking medications to treat bipolar disorder are more likely to get well faster and stay well if they receive intensive psychotherapy.

Do I have your attention?  Today we continue with Ellen Frank's Treating Bipolar Disorder, in which she describes this therapy of her invention.

What Happens In IPSRT

Treating Bipolar Disorder Part I -- Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy

Medication And Mental Illness

Medication for mental illness is just like medication for anything else.  It works better when you don't ask it to do all the work itself.

In the case of bipolar, once lithium and the chemical imbalance theory came along, the thinking was that medication was the only thing that worked.  Therapy by itself certainly didn't.  I wonder if therapists, worn out by their bipolar patients, were simply relieved to believe that medication was the only thing that worked.  I wonder if therapists today, worn out by their recurrent depression patients, are secretly relieved to terminate when the diagnosis changes to bipolar, because medication is the only thing that works.

Frankly, there is a lot of wishful thinking out there in pharmacotherapy land.  If only our brains were a chemical stew and the illnesses of the brain could be treated by adjusting the recipe.  If only.

But people with mental illness, especially people with bipolar, can't afford the wishful thinking behind the better living through chemistry fantasy.  Sometimes the medications do work.  But not as well nor as often as your doctor would like to think.

I have a friend who is a psychiatrist.  He challenges his colleagues who keep trying to solve this noncompliance issue, to get their patients to comply.  He reminds them, if the medication (antidepressants, in this example) worked for 40% of those who took it in the trial, and the placebo worked for 30%, that means only three out of ten people benefit from the medication itself.  So what's the big deal about seven who quit?

He says they just look at him funny.

Treating Bipolar Disorder by Ellen Frank

This same friend, God bless him, loaned me a book about a psychotherapy designed specifically for bipolar disorder titled, appropriately enough, Treating Bipolar Disorder.  The author Ellen Frank, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and director of the Depression and Manic Depression Prevention program at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, and her colleagues invented Interpersonal Social Rhythms Therapy (IPSRT), a kind of mash-up between talk therapy and regulating circadian rhythms.  It gets my next few posts.

In A Nutshell... 

IPSRT [is] a treatment that seeks to improve outcomes that are usually obtained with pharmacotherapy alone for patients suffering from bipolar I disorder by integrating efforts to regularize their social rhythms (in the hope of protecting their circadian rhythms from disruption) with efforts to improve the quality of their interpersonal relationships and social role functioning.

The Termites Ate My Blogpost

They ate my baseboards, actually.  But the effect, as zeitstorers, was the same.  My apologies to regular readers who are waiting for my next post.  It will tell you what zeitstorers are, in the first installment of a review of Ellen Frank's Treating Bipolar Disorder.  The image here is a hint.

Coming soon...