For a start, there are a few ways you can get a diagnosis. You can do it through a professional diagnosis or a self-questionnaire. Before you make your choice, do note that bipolar disorder can be difficult to diagnose.

In fact, it has been estimated at up to 70% of patients with bipolar disorder has gotten at least one inccurate psychiatric assessment. Sometimes the time between the appearance of the first symptoms and the time an accurate diagnosis is received can take more than ten years.

It is not easy to diagnose bipolar disorder as it is easily mistaken as depression. The mania and hypomania are often overlooked as just ordinary emotions. Other common misdiagnoses include schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia.

That said, it also means that while you can use questionnaires and screening tools, you should not rely on it alone to make a diagnosis. These tools can be found easily online and they merely help to rule in or out whether someone has the likelihood of the illness.

At this time, you may be wondering if there is a lab test that can determine if one has bipolar disorder. Unfortunately the answer is no. While there has been active research on bipolar disorder, there is presently no lab test to do that. Of course, things may change as there are many exciting advances in the field of brain research.

There is definitely bipolar disorder test you can make use of but do note that getting an accurate diagnosis is important so do seek professional medical help if you are unsure.

For many years, medical experts have always classified bipolar disorder and schizophrenia as two distinct mental disorders. In fact, many psychiatrists still have the practice of separating bipolar disorder and schizophrenia even up to today.

However, to a person on the street, when you consider the symptoms of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, the distinctions are blurred and it is indeed very difficult to tell the differences from one another. Even psychiatrists often misdiagnose.

The diagnosis of bipolar disorder, like many other medical condition, involves systematically ruling out other conditions that can imitate it. There are certainly many conditions that can look a bit or a alot like bipolar disorder.

Bipolar disorder describes patterns of abnormal and servere mood swings, ranging from disabling depression to mania while schizophrenia covers a broad range of disorders that are a combination of psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions and thought disorganization.

In both cases, patients can display the lack of apathy and motivation. There is even an illness known as schizoaffective disorder where the patient has mood swings episodes that fall under the diagnosis of bipolar disorder and symptoms of schizophrenia that persists after the mood episode is over.

A recent study has found the link between bipolar and schizophrenia. If schizophrenia has been running in a family, there is a high possibility that bipolar disorder will run in there too. This suggests that both disorders may be caused by the same genes.

This means that psychiatrists should not be viewing these disorders separately anymore. While bipolar schizophrenia may still exist as separate entities, it goes to show that it is still best to leave the diagnosis to the professionals.

In fact, it has been found that the closer you are related to the person who has the disorder, the more likely you are to develop it. That also means that your chance of developing it decreases the more distantly related you are.

However, it does not mean that you will necessarily develop the disorder if someone in the family has it. While it will most likely run in the family, it can also happen in people without any family history. It appears that genetic can only offer part of the answer.

Scientists have pinned down the genes causing bipolar disorder to chromosomes 22 and 13. If you really want to know, schizophrenia is also attributed to the same genes. Presently, there is no tests that can tell who will or who will not develop bipolar.

That said, if you believe you have a higher risk for developing bipolar, you should make efforts to keep away from drugs, alcohol and undue stress. This is because other factors like environment, drugs and stress can also come into the picture.

Drugs, for example, have been known to cause symptoms of bipolar disorder. Stimulants can set off a manic episode while drugs like cocaine can trigger off mania or even depression. Studies have shown that people who are already predisposed to such disorder may trigger off these psychotic symptoms unknowingly.

Now that you know what are some likely bipolar disorder causes, it would do you alot of good to know more about bipolar disorder.

You should be able to identify the rapid-fire speech pattern symptom of bipolar disorder that takes hold of the sufferer all of a sudden when they are about to go into their mania. You might have been having a conversation with them and they are talking cool, and suddenly they might seem to go off. Good time to call the doctor.

The contrast between the manic symptoms of bipolar disorder in a sufferer, and the depressive ones is what has allowed the condition to be tagged ‘the fine madness.’ Quite sincerely, when you have to live with the patient yourself, the far extremes of the symptoms could very nearly drive you mad yourself.

Certain symptoms of bipolar disorder in the manic state of the condition causes you to go off in so many directions when you are talking that people may find it hard to make sense of what you are trying to say. Yet, your inflated sense of self-esteem may cause you to not care too much either way. It is not an easy condition to live with.

The confidence of a bipolar disorder patient may cause them to have certain delusions of grandeur. Nostalgia, a far different symptom – say on an opposite pole – may set in very shortly after, and you may begin to wonder if you are speaking to the same person. This symptom is what has resulted sometimes in the disease being misdiagnosed as schizophrenia.

Mania in bipolar disorder may cause you to be irrationally, unjustly and unfairly impatient with someone that you care about. Sure you are suffering from a disease, but that is not immediately apparent to them, and that abrasiveness can drive them away from you. It is such symptoms that cause a lot of sufferers to go through life alone.

One symptom of bipolar disorder that often occurs on both poles of the condition is untold frustration. Of course it happens for different reasons in either phase, and of course it manifests in different ways too. When manic, you will tend to be physically abusive as a result, and when depressive you will instead kick yourself in the head.

You may find a sufferer of bipolar disorder often behave in socially inappropriate ways time and again. It is not strange to have them think irrationally either. It is at times like this that they often show impaired judgment about even the most basic things. Beware of symptoms like these, because they rarely end well.