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Summary: It may raise more questions than your doctor wants to answer
Review: This book is great. And very well researched.He does a good job letting us know that there are differences in the types of medications prescibed for rapid cycling vs. "traditional" bipolar. And he gives us some accurate scales to describe the degree of mania or depression. The case studies are very well chosen, and each person who reads this book should be able to find a bit of themselves contained therein. Very important: The reading level is very light and it reads like a magazine. Sometimes, these bipolar books tend to go bipolar: Either they read like a medical journal, or they read like a romance novel. Miklowitz has found the happy medium.
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Summary: Regularly use this book for reference
Review: This book is the best reference I have found for quickly accessing detailed information on treating my bipolar. The author's tone is sometimes condescending but the information contained in the book has proven priceless in helping me learn to handle being bipolar.
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Summary: One of the best!!
Review: This book talks to you, not at you. It has been helpful in seeing symptoms that I was unaware were symptoms without being pompus or talking over my head. The author keeps the flow of the text like a friend, explaning a new condition, not a life seantance, and helps find a way to build your life around the diagnoses. This is truly an uplifting and helpful format that the author has used and I recomend it to anyone, newly diagnosed, long time dealing with it, or family or friend.
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Summary: Great book for family and friends!
Review: This is a good book for family and friends of those dealing with bipolar disorder. It is informative and easy to get through - not dry and textbook-like.
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Summary: Book review from Colorado
Review: When media began publicizing the increase in diagnoses for bipolar disorder a few years ago, it was all but certain that the naysayers eventually would follow.
Bipolar? Yeah, right. That's just the latest fancy excuse for people who don't want to take responsibility for their own actions.
That backlash has already begun.
Those who doubt bipolar is real, or serious, might talk to a friend who's been diagnosed with this potentially devastating brain disorder (once better known as manic depression). It is characterized by cycles of crushing depression alternating with periods of excessive physical, mental and even spiritual energy.
Anyone who has bipolar disorder will tell you: It's real. Unlike other mental health conditions, it does seem to have an "upside" -- sometimes people in hypo-manic stages can be highly creative, gregarious and energetic -- but over time, it can be debilitating, exhausting and even fatal.
In a time of increasing public skepticism, it's nice that one of the nation's top bipolar disorder researchers has published a user-friendly guide to the disease for patients and their families.
"The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide;What You and Your Family Need to Know" by David Miklowitz, (Guilford Press; $18.95) professor of psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is an essential resource.
Time and again in his practical guide, Miklowitz reminds those with bipolar disorder that they are not imagining their disease, and even that the disease itself can make patients prone to doubting themselves.
"The absence of a definitive test (for the disease) makes it easy to forget that you have a bio-chemical imbalance and even easier to believe that you never had one in the first place," he writes. "... Many people start to believe that 'I had this illness once, but now it's under my control,' especially when they've been well for a while. But bipolar symptoms have a way of recurring when you least expect them."
The book offers a wealth of material that can help demystify the disorder. Miklowitz methodically explains the disease, its symptoms and diagnosis, moves on to cogent explanations of its possible causes ("genetics, biology and stress"), then spends most of the book offering advice on how to manage it. He even offers worksheets and logs to help people come to a better understanding of and approach to bipolar illness.
Books by academic researchers always have the potential to be bone-dry. But Miklowitz understands that accessibility is the goal here and is writing for the layperson, even peppering the text with real-life experiences of people with the illness . Reading some of these can be both illuminating and horrifying. Especially when they are in mania, people with this chemical imbalance can do some dangerous, illegal and destructive (to family, friends, self and even strangers) things.
Informative, interesting, and compassionate, "The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide" is a valuable new resource for people with the illness, and their family and friends.
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