Basically, over a ten-year period while you suffer from bipolar disorder, you tend to have about four complete cycles between mania and depression. However, some forms of the disorder can have you running through both extreme emotional poles of the condition within a single year. As a matter of fact, rapid cycling bipolar disorder can take you there and back again within a single week.

Because of its symptoms, bipolar disorder is also called manic-depressive illness. It often begins when you are in your late teens or early twenties, but it has been known to start up earlier in a few rare cases.

A type of bipolar disorder can take you through severe depression in which you experience painful sadness, negative thinking, and indifference to things that used to bring you happiness. When manic, people with bipolar disorder often feel intensely elated, self-important, energetic, and irritable. However, in this form of bipolar disorder, specifically called bipolar disorder II, your mania tends to not be as serious, often referred to as hypomania. You feel the elation, the energy, self-importance and irritation, but they are not as self-destructive as it they normally would be for bipolar disorder I.

It is not often that you find this condition in children, but it is not impossible either. You should particularly be watchful of your child if you suffer from bipolar disorder yourself, or any other type of depression for that matter. It has been proven by research that children are genetically linked to their parents in more ways than just looks. When a parent has suffered from depression of any kind before, the child is automatically susceptible due to genetics.

This was proven by experiments carried out on identical and fraternal twins. Upward of 75 percent of the time, when one identical twin had symptoms of the condition, the other twin has it too – they share the same DNA, you know. When it came to fraternal twins, the phenomenon was observed only in 10 percent of the test subjects – they share only half their DNA, once and for all proving the genetic link.

When you know that your child is predisposed to bipolar disorder, you want to be careful about their childhood experiences. There is no way to keep them from having bitter experiences, but you can help to see that they learn to manage it earlier on. That way, as they grow up, they will be better able to handle it. If you must use medication, use something in the range of lithium carbonate, but under professional supervision. It does have some side effects that you would not want your child to suffer unduly.

Personally, I favor the anger and stress management route. The Good Book after all says that you need to ‘train up a child the way he should go; when he is old he shall not depart from it.’

It is possible that you are not aware of ways on how to cure bipolar disorder. Why, the cure doesn’t even exist yet. But you should know already of effective management procedures that exist for it you suffer from the disease. If you don’t, you had better start to look for them already, because it can only take so long before the disease takes over, and you don’t want that.

Many bipolar disorder treatments and medications target on preventing the recurrence of your manic and depressive episodes because they really don’t know how to cure it just yet. You do have to see that you know how they work though, so that you don’t apply them wrongly. If you are going to beat the disease, you have to stay sharp.

Bipolar disorder is a mental disease that fluctuates you between enthusiasm and obsession, desperate gloominess. And as though these two aren’t horrible enough on their own, bipolar disorder may choose from time to time to mix them both up in your mind. Why else do you think so many people decide to call it quits midway between?

Your mixed bipolar disorder episodes aren’t like a relief or a balance for the symptoms of the disease. Actually, they are periods of rapid cycling of the two far poles that characterize it, but a third party layman may not know that. What they see is just you freaking out, and before long they freak out themselves.

You cannot – or should not – try to treat bipolar disorder use the standard antidepressant. That could just send you into the manic phase of the condition in a very short time. The same works in the other direction. The standard mania medications may just put you in a horrid depression. That’s why there must be a medication that balances both properties.

There are all kinds of medications that treat acute manic-depressive illness, but they are not drugs that you can get on your own. As a matter of fact, most medical professionals in the field dislike prescribing and having you go buy them, and instead would rather administer them to you by themselves.