Medication

Intensive and long-term supervised treatment is important, to prevent huge disruption to the personal, career and financial life of the person with bipolar illness . A recent survey over 10 years showed some bipolar people were slightly to very unwell nearly half of their lives.

An Australian psychiatrist, Dr. John Cade, discovered in the late 1940s that a salt called lithium treated and prevented further attacks of bipolar illness. It took many years for his discovery to be accepted around the world. However, once the benefits of lithium became obvious, many people who had previously been labelled as having other psychiatric illnesses, ranging from schizophrenia to anxiety were realized to actually be suffering from bipolar illness, a condition which now could be treated and prevented with lithium. In recent times, we have a whole new generation of mood stabilizers (ranging from medications used to treat epilepsy to medications sometimes used to treat anxiety and schizophrenia) which we now realize can treat and prevent bipolar illness. Details of the medications are described in the section “Advice for GPs”.