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Tuesday, June 17, 2003
posted by gbarto at 1:52 AM:
Charming. I just finished noting A Dog's Life's move to its own site to escape blogger a minute ago and now blogger isn't updating properly. We'll see if this post kicks it through. Meanwhile, a thought:Early today I commented a little on bipolar disorder and new research. One important point is that many specialists are shying away from the term manic depressive because bipolar commonly causes alternating euphoria and depression but can (for type II) cause alternating anxiety and depression - it's a shift between poles, not between mania and depression necessarily. My question: What is the range for where these poles might be located and is the disease significant for the moods it causes or the way it causes inexplicable shifting of mood between extremes? The question is important, for if it is the latter, we should also be looking at sudden shifts from anxiety to euphoria, from passion to detachment, from anger to calm with a stronger focus on what goes bing! in the feedback mechanisms in the brain. I would not be surprised to discover that there are a lot more bipolar disorders out there than widely acknowledged because some of the shifts, while surprising, might not be as inherently destructive as those that get the focus. In which case, we would be missing a lot of potential understanding of what hits those who are most profoundly hurt by the disease's effects because they are often not in shape to do the sort of probing necessary to figure out what's going on when the sudden shifts hit. I would also not be surprised to discover that the newly discovered genetic components produce the volatility but that other factors, both innate and environmental, determine where the poles exist between which sufferers flip. But this is drawn from my experiences with one sufferer of bipolar disorder, not from a clinical research project, so take it as food for thought, not the latest line of inquiry.
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