Reflecting the author-s vast clinical experience as a psychiatrist, this volume explains why so many people with treatment resistant depression respond to medication used to treat individuals with bipolar disorder. The book also helps to minimize the bipolar stigma by introducing the concept of "mood dysregulation."
At present, people with mood dysregulation are not adequately described on the pages of any diagnostic manual. A cardinal feature of mood dysregulation is dysphoria, a negative mood that is poorly understood but mistaken for the negative mood of depression, creating diagnostic confusion, one of the sources of treatment resistant depression. The author explains that a preponderance of the people she has seen in her practice who have so-called depression have mood disorders with features of bipolar disorder, including response to medications typically effective in people with bipolar disorders. Thus, these people are research orphans: to this day, a paucity of litera
