How Psychotherapy Can Help Bipolar Disorder

While medication remains the bedrock treatment for bipolar disorder, a few different types of psychotherapy have been modified especially for people with this condition. The therapies that have been tested include helping patients work on family coping and relationships; learn to understand and reorder their own distorted thinking; and develop strategies for managing mood swings.

The best therapy programs include these four common features.

• Providing a solid structure for each day
• Avoiding overstimulation and getting enough sleep
• Resolving any family conflicts that contribute to symptoms
• Learning to recognize the warning signs of manic and depressive episodes

Until quite recently talk therapy had a minor role to play in the treatment of bipolar disorder. Many patients describe hospitalizations combined with high doses of mood-flattening drugs, but little effort to understand the sometimes irrational thoughts of people with the disorder.

While she was in college, Laurel Lemke, now 54, of Lakewood, Wash., was hospitalized for the first time, for six weeks. "During my first mania, I thought I had ESP, because my mind was putting connections between things in a way that made me think I had special abilities," she says. She doesn't know the diagnosis that was made because no one told her then. "At that time doctors didn't share their diagnoses with patients."