Bipolar: What You Need to Know About This Emotional Disorder
Have you ever seen people with alternate emotion? Some times they are happy, and some times they are depressed. Worst, some of them who wanted to commit suicide. This symptom is called bipolar disorder.
Bipolar is one of the mental differences that have characters or mood that are always changing between depression and mania.
Bipolar is a global disorder. In fact, in the United States, almost 5 million people suffering from this problem and 3 million people in Japan. In general, bipolar symptoms will begin to appear at the age of 25 years.
Mania Phase Symptoms
It is a phase where there is a constant feeling of happiness and extreme or irritability (anger) and an increase in activity as well as abnormal energy going on every week.
Among the symptoms that may occur during this phase:
- Increase in self-esteem and grandiosity.
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Less the need to sleep, for example, only need to sleep two to three hours a day but still feel fresh.
- Talk more than usual.
- Has a lot of ideas and feels like your mind is moving fast.
- Easily distracted or unable to concentrate.
- Increase of purposeful activity or psychomotor anxiety (psychomotor agitation).
- Extreme involvement in risky activities and adverse effects such as uncontrolled shopping, random sexual intercourse, or invest money without thinking long.
Hypomania phase is a series of mania that is lighter and usually does not affect such individual so much.
In the depression phase, they may see:
- Extreme sadness (for a week or more)
- No hope in yourself
- Loss of energy
- Loss of interest in activities that they usually do.
- Sleep too much or too short
- Intention to commit suicide.
Theoretically, this emotional disorder is caused by a chemical imbalance (neurotransmitter) in the brains of Serotonin and Dopamine users.
Both of these chemicals are higher than usual in the mania phase and lower in the depression phase.
Serotonin plays a vital role in our emotion while Dopamine is also important in controlling movement, focus and motivation.
However, different form various psychosis disorders such as schizophrenia, diseases that require confusion of emotions like bipolar have a better level of prognosis healing.
There are some ways in which treatment can be done. Among them are using emotional stabilizing drugs, counselling appointments or psychotherapy treatment.
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