Mood disorders

This is the second most serious mental illness after schizophrenia. There are two prototypes of mood syndromes. Mania is characterized by extreme and unreasonable cheerfulness. The person's mood is described as euphoric or elated. He has fat racing thoughts, fast and pressured speech. His activity level increases. In some cases the patient develops grandiose ideas, which reaches delusional conviction in some cases. The person may believe that he is of superior birth, has higher purpose and is chosen by God, or he may believe that he is wealthy and spend recklessly. This cheerfulness may suddenly shift to irritability, anger and assaulting tendency at times. Usually this occurs when relatives try to control the behavior by advice or other means. A milder version of the same condition is called hypomania.
Depression is the opposite extreme. I have already discussed about depression in an earlier post (The black cloud of depression - 09/03/08). Bipolar disorder is a condition which a person shows symptoms of mania (or hypomania) and depression at different times.
Depression can occur as a single episode or as Recurrent depression with multiple episodes. If such a patient develops mania or hypomania later, the diagnosis of recurrent depression changes to bipolar disorder. This condition is subdivided in to several subtypes. If the person get s episodes of both Mania and depression it is called Bipolar Disorder Type I. If he gets depression and hypomanic episodes only it is called Type II. There are many other subtypes but we need not go in to these at present.