Affective disorders, including major depression, mania and bipolar disorder, represent a spectrum of severe psychiatric diseases reflecting a continuum of psychopathological symptoms. Starting in young adulthood and often leading to suicidal ideation, affective disorders are ranking among the most disabling diseases worldwide in terms of the WHO global burden of disease, are socio-economically ...

Manic depressive illness is a common and frequently debilitating familial psychiatric disorder. Efforts to understand the mechanisms of inheritance have been hindered by the complexity of the phenotype, which may range from benign mood swings to chronic psychosis, and by apparently nonmendelian modes of transmission. Early reports of linkage to chromosomal loci have fallen into doubt; however t...

The phenomenology of mania has not been empirically studied adequately. Various studies have revealed 2. 4 & 5 factors as the core features defining the manic state. Differences in the Bipolar disorders have been reported across culture in the past further complicating the issue.This study was carried out to study the core features of the manic state and compare it with similar studies across c...

OBJECTIVE Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) can enhance the excitement of the brain through adjusting the biological activities of the cerebral cortex and has wide biological effects, making it one basic mechanism of therapy for depression. In the treatment of unipolar depressive disorder, almost in every treatment method, hypomanic and manic shifts can be observed. There is s...

Lithium, manic-depressive illness, and psychological test performance For over 10 years patients responding to treatment at a lithium clinic' have been free from psychiatric symptoms. Little is known about the psychological performance of such patients, but a report,2 using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), confirmed that lithium produces a response in depression. Clinical...

Reduced perceptual span has been suggested to be a cognitive marker of vulnerability to schizophrenia. However, the specificity of this impairment in visual information processing to schizophrenia is not well established. This preliminary study examined perceptual span in schizophrenic and manic patients divided into subgroups with and without active symptomatology. Symptomatic patients had red...