In the contemporary society, there exist a variety of mental disorders. These are conditions which interfere with the normal functioning of the individuals hence end up altering their feelings, thoughts and behaviors. However, it is not easy for the physicians, nurses, psychiatrists and the rest of the society to accurately and correctly identify these orders (Bowden, C. L., 2001). It is very difficult to distinguish between mental health and illnesses since there is single simple test that can be used to prove if something is amiss. Instead, there are presumed not to be a physical disorder, but are only diagnosed and treated based on their day to day effects, signs and symptoms.
Bipolar disorder, also called manic-depressive disorder is a type of mental illness that causes manic or hypomanic moody feelings and depressions. As a mental illness, bipolar disorder is not easy to confirm (Lepage, R. et al., 2000). Even if it also results into depressions, it is not easy to distinguish the type of depressions it causes from others caused by different disorders. Besides, it is one of the abnormal behaviors which can not be concisely defined. Moreover, it does not have a fixed boundary from the rest of the other disorders (Altman, E. G. Et al., 2007).
The other barrier in the identification of this disorder is the social cultural norms instituted by the society towards people. Many people have therefore deliberately decided to have stereotypical beliefs and stigmatization used in classifying such illnesses. However, in order to deal with such challenges, it is important to comply with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders and thoroughly scrutinize the signs and symptoms of various disorders before coming into a logical conclusion about them (Bargren, A. E. et al., 2011). This is the surest way of ascertaining the kind of mental disorder a person is suffering from.
References
Altman, E. G. Et al. (2007). "The Altman Self-Rating Mania Scale".
Biological Psychiatry 42 (10): 948–955.
Bargren, A. E. et al. (2011) “Can Biochemical Abnormalities Predict Symptomatology in Patients with Primary Hyperparathyroidism, Journal of the American College of Surgeons
Bowden, C. L. (2001). "Strategies to reduce misdiagnosis of bipolar
depression". Psychiatric services (Washington, D.C.) 52 (1): 51–55.
Lepage, R. et al. (2000) “Clinical performance of a parathyrin immunoassay with dynamically determined reference values". Clinical chemistry
