When you have bipolar affective disorder, you will find yourself suffering from extreme mood swings, which range between acute euphoria mania and severe depression. In bipolar affective disorder, the depression you suffer from is as bad sometimes as major depression, which I must assure you is a very bad thing; and the mania can be mild or severe.

The manic phase of bipolar affective disorder can have you feeling unusually and unreasonably capable; like you own the world and that nothing can go wrong. It is worse because you tend to feel irritable when you want something and you cannot have it, and it may cause you to lash out at the people you love. Of course in this energized state, you are bound to have trouble sleeping and engage in rapid-fire speech that is heading you nowhere.

When you are suffering from the depression of bipolar affective disorder, you are entirely the opposite. Things could get as bad as hallucinations and delusions, but often it begins with the weakness and listlessness that often is quickly followed by a sense of helplessness that makes it hard for people to be able to enjoy your company. When you are depressive, the things that used to make you happy all of a sudden have little or no positive effect on you, and you are indifferent to them. Interestingly, you also lose appetite and sleep in this phase, and you may feel like committing suicide.

Well, I can say one thing about that; when you feel like committing suicide, don’t do it!

The treatment for bipolar affective disorder is one that you want to consider with utmost care. You can’t be too careful because treating one phase of the condition could trigger off the other chapter of it without warning. For instance, if you took medication for major depression, it may cure the depressive phase of your bipolar affective disorder, but it could also prompt a manic episode.

Perhaps the most reliable treatment for the ‘disease’ is lithium carbonate and a number of other lithium salts. Lithium carbonate is a natural mineral salt that has the ability to control both your mania and your depression. If you took the medication at a time when you were ‘normal’, you would be able to stave off the attacks of either phase. It has one catch, though; it weakens your kidneys somewhat. If you have kidney issues, you don’t want to use lithium carbonate.

Other ways you can attempt to treat your bipolar affective disorder include a healthier diet, some exercise, and serious stress management. If you can manage the stress in your life, you may be able to see that nothing sets you off either manically or depressively.

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.’