Medications help manage symptoms, but it can take some time to find one that works well for you and minimizes side effects. This is one good reason to consider residential care for comorbid substance abuse and bipolar disorder. A residence provides a safe place to stabilize on the appropriate medications. While it may seem daunting to try to manage bipolar disorder and give up alcohol, there is hope.
Treatment for Bipolar Disorder and Alcohol Use Disorder Can Be Effective.
People with bipolar disorder experience mood episodes categorized as depressive, manic, or hypomanic. Periods of stable mood that occur between these episodes are called euthymic. A co-occurring SUD can complicate the diagnosis and treatment of both conditions. People with bipolar disorder and an SUD may have greater health challenges that affect their ability to follow and complete treatment regimens. In BD, comorbid SUD and especially AUD are rather the rule than the exception. Pharmacological and integrated psychotherapeutic approaches that give equal weight to both disorders, while still scarce, are recommended.
Treatment for substance use disorder is most effective when all your needs are addressed. This includes many factors, but most importantly it means that you must be treated for both bipolar disorder and alcohol use disorder. Depending on which drugs you take for bipolar disorder, alcohol may interfere with their ability to work correctly. If you take lithium for mood stabilization, there is a risk of developing toxic levels of the drug in tharros house your body. The risk of toxic lithium levels is higher if you drink too much, as alcohol causes dehydration. Individuals with mental health conditions may be more likely to use alcohol as a treatment.
Family history and severity of symptoms should also factor into diagnostic considerations. Given that bipolar disorder and substance abuse co-occur so frequently, it also makes sense to screen for substance abuse in people seeking treatment for bipolar disorder. Despite the literature, it remains unclear how alcohol use fluctuates over time in BD and how longitudinal dynamics interact with proximal changes in depressive, manic or hypomanic, and anxiety symptoms. Examining these dynamics can inform the mechanisms of how alcohol use plays a role in poorer outcomes in BD, when to intervene, and whether alcohol use affects mood symptoms even at subclinical levels.
Drinking alcohol can become a coping mechanism to deal with feelings of hopelessness, numbness, guilt, and worthlessness. Having one or more of these risk factors is not a guarantee you will have an SUD. However, it’s important to be aware of the ways you may be uniquely vulnerable so you can take preventive measures.
People with bipolar disorder have been statistically shown to be more likely to develop a substance use disorder (SUD) than the general population. If your bipolar disorder symptoms or substance use is causing regular stress to your mental health, it can be valuable to find a therapist to work with regularly. In fact, the lifetime prevalence of SUDs in people with bipolar I disorder is at least 40%. Dealing with the symptoms of despair, fatigue, lack of motivation, changes in sleeping and eating, and a general disruption of life, habits, and relationships can be almost too much to bear. It can seem like medication for bipolar depression isn’t working fast enough or well enough.
- Women with depression are also more likely to engage in binge drinking.
- Alcohol dependence, also known as alcoholism, is characterized by a craving for alcohol, possible physical dependence on alcohol, an inability to control one’s drinking on any given occasion, and an increasing tolerance to alcohol’s effects (APA 1994).
- Thus, valproate appears to be a safe and effective medication for alcoholic bipolar patients.
Does Depression Drive You to Drink Alcohol?
However, self-medication through substance use has serious health risks, including overdose and death. “SUD” refers to when a person continues to use substances despite experiencing negative or harmful consequences. These substances can be alcohol, illegal drugs, or other drugs, including prescription medications like opioids. Bipolar depression medications and alcohol both work in the central nervous system (CNS), including the brain and its chemistry. This means that alcohol can and does worsen the side-effects of bipolar medications.
For intermediate and long-term treatment, the dogma persisted for a long time that AUD needs to be treated first and sufficiently before attention should be paid to the mental health disorder. Today, strategies that promote concomitant therapy of dual disorders are the established treatment of choice (80) and recommended in major guidelines (81). However, treatment adherence and compliance remain a challenge in this special group, since medications are often not taken as prescribed (61) and psychotherapy appointments are often missed. Studies support that the most important predictor of non-adherence in BD is comorbid alcohol and/or drug abuse (82, 83). Thus, effective psychosocial (84), psychoeducational (85, 86) or psychotherapeutic (87, 88) intervention for AUD and BD can also positively impact on medication adherence and, by this, ameliorate the course especially of BD (84).
In Bipolar Disorder+-
Antidepressants, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, and other drugs help manage symptoms and reduce the frequency and severity of mood cycles. The researchers found that patients in the complicated group had a significantly earlier age of onset of bipolar disorder than the other groups. They also found that the complicated and secondary groups had higher rates of suicide attempts than did the primary group. Preisig and colleagues (2001) also reported that the onset of bipolar disorder tended to precede that of alcoholism. They concluded that this finding is in accordance with results of clinical studies that suggest alcoholism is often a complication of bipolar disorder rather than a risk factor for it. Addictions are highly prevalent in bipolar disorder and greatly affect clinical outcomes.
Why and How Drinking Alcohol Affects Bipolar Depression Medication
Your doctor may also conduct a medical exam to rule out the possibility of other underlying conditions. You also must have experienced one or more hypomanic episodes lasting for at least 4 days. In the United States, about 4.4 percent of adults will experience bipolar disorder at some point in their lives, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. A bipolar diagnosis is described as type 1 or 2, depending on the severity of symptoms.
Others have suggested that bipolar and AUD may share genetic risk factors. In neuroimaging studies, there are a number of areas of interest in BD and indeed in AUD that have emerged in different studies in different populations. Have identified areas including the pre-frontal cortex, the corpus striatum and the amygdala as being abnormal in early BD, potentially predating illness (Chang et al., 2004, Strakowski et al., 2005b).
