Bipolar disorder (BD) is a psychiatric diagnosis that describes a category of mood disorders defined by the presence of 
one or more episodes of abnormally elevated mood clinically referred to as mania or, if milder, hypomania (source: wikipedia.org). Bipolar, or manic-depressive disorder, is a mood disorder that causes radical emotional changes and mood swings, from manic highs to depressive lows. The majority of bipolar individuals experience alternating episodes of mania and depression (medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com).
It is known that lithium is moderately useful during all phases of bipolar illness, but it is still unclear whether this should be lithium, an antidepressant, an antipsychotic or something else, or whether the selection of the comparator agent should be based on the acute or the most recent phase, according to one article of Annals of General Psychiatry Journals published in October 2007.
There were problems in diagnosing Bipolar Disorder as it is often retrospective and carries the risk of bias and memory distortions when collecting scientific data on the treatment of Bipolar Disorder, and made its reliability and validity questionable remained. In this context, maybe the development of treatment guidelines seems to be a must issue, in order to standardize treatment choices and apply research data to everyday clinical practice, by integrating information from different sources into easily applicable and accessible algorithms, according to the article.
Konstantinos N Fountoulakis from Third Department of Psychiatry, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and colleagues tried to summarize the contemporary of knowledge and practice of BD’s treatment as BD is a multi-faceted illness with a complex treatment by performing a selective review of the literature.
The authors said, the literature suggests that proper treatment of BD patients needs continuous administration of an antimanic agent. We can find a comprehensive evaluation of the data concerning the various treatment modalities against the different facets of BD which was shown in table looked. Information about Lithium, Anticonvulsant, Antipsycotics, Antidepressants, and Psychotherapy and other non-pharmacological therapies including Psychoeducation interventions and the efficacy of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) were described here in this article.
Find complete read about Guidelines for The Treatment of Bipolar Disorder in PDF filetype (450 KB) download available (source: annals-general-psychiatry.com).
