Interesting study since one of the hallmark symptoms of bipolar is a lack of sleep, and BDNF is lacking in bipolar individuals who are depressed. I think more research should be done to see if this therapy can throw someone into bipolar disorder.
A bothering trend in the psychiatric community, which is now being recognized by mental health professionals, is the overuse of labels without looking at the patient’s individual symptoms and tackling them accordingly. The lack of objective tests also gives rise to misdiagnosis, even for severe disorders such as bipolar, and is dangerously more common than people realize:
“According to Zimmerman’s study, the underdiagnosis of bipolar disorder is not the case. Rather, only 43 percent of those surveyed who were diagnosed with bipolar disorder actually match the criteria for the disorder.”
In addition, some important institutions in mental health realize the current mental health institution is broken and want to incorporate genetics, cognitive science, neuroimaging etc. to develop a new one. While far from perfect, this is a step towards the right direction and will bring us closer to an objective test of mental health.
At the moment, people are being diagnosed on an illness built on shaky grounds, and there is a good chance that professionals won’t even bother to consult those shaky grounds when diagnosing.
Nice! I picked up the same idea some years ago from a therapist who used short-term sleep deprivation to get someone too depressed to do anything at all enough into a manic state to begin real therapy. (Sorry, no citation.) I wonder how sustainable this is, though.
One of the weirder citations I’ve picked up over the years is “Rapid antidepressant effects of sleep deprivation therapy correlates with serum BDNF changes in major depression”. Apparently sleep deprivation is a known treatment for depression?
Interesting study since one of the hallmark symptoms of bipolar is a lack of sleep, and BDNF is lacking in bipolar individuals who are depressed. I think more research should be done to see if this therapy can throw someone into bipolar disorder.
A bothering trend in the psychiatric community, which is now being recognized by mental health professionals, is the overuse of labels without looking at the patient’s individual symptoms and tackling them accordingly. The lack of objective tests also gives rise to misdiagnosis, even for severe disorders such as bipolar, and is dangerously more common than people realize:
“According to Zimmerman’s study, the underdiagnosis of bipolar disorder is not the case. Rather, only 43 percent of those surveyed who were diagnosed with bipolar disorder actually match the criteria for the disorder.”
In addition, some important institutions in mental health realize the current mental health institution is broken and want to incorporate genetics, cognitive science, neuroimaging etc. to develop a new one. While far from perfect, this is a step towards the right direction and will bring us closer to an objective test of mental health.
At the moment, people are being diagnosed on an illness built on shaky grounds, and there is a good chance that professionals won’t even bother to consult those shaky grounds when diagnosing.
Sources: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml http://hub.jhu.edu/2013/04/30/depression-diagnoses-study
Nice! I picked up the same idea some years ago from a therapist who used short-term sleep deprivation to get someone too depressed to do anything at all enough into a manic state to begin real therapy. (Sorry, no citation.) I wonder how sustainable this is, though.