In 1981, seven patients with nonseasonal depression were treated with bright white light in 1982, bright artificial light was used to treat a manic-depressive patient with a seasonal mood cycle. In the last 20 years, a plethora of studies have further defined the depressive populations, who are responsive to light treatment; the optimal timing, intensity, spectral frequency, and duration of tre...

The associations between depressive symptoms and hypersomnia are complex and often bidirectional. Of the many disorders associated with excessive sleepiness in the general population, the most frequent are mental health disorders, particularly depression. However, most mood disorder studies addressing hypersomnia have assessed daytime sleepiness using a single response, neglecting critical and ...

Growing clinical evidence in support of the efficacy and safety of sleep deprivation (SD), and its biological mechanisms of action suggest that this technique can now be included among the first-line antidepressant treatment strategies for mood disorders. SD targets the broadly defined depressive syndrome, and can be administered according to several different treatment schedules: total versus ...

BACKGROUND Mood disorders are expressed in many heterogeneous forms, varying from anxiety to severe major clinical depression. The disorders are expressed in individual variety through manifestations governed by co-morbidities, symptom frequency, severity, and duration, and the effects of genes on phenotypes. The underlying etiologies of mood disorders consist of complex interactive operations ...

‘If I can’t feel, if I can’t move, if I can’t think, and I can’t care, then what conceivable point is there in living?’ (Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness) Mood is a person’s subjective emotional state. According to the DSM-IV the term mood disorder is used for a group of diagnoses where the primary symptom is a disturbance in mood, or in other words the exper...

Depression is a serious mental disorder manifested by depressed mood, pessimistic thoughts, feelings of worthlessness, feelings of guilt, tearfulness, reduced or increased sleep, appetite loss or appetite disturbance, weight loss or weight gain, social restlessness, loss of interest, difficulty concentrating. Mania is characterized by abnormally elevated or irritable mood, arousal, and/or energ...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW The aim of this review is to highlight the traditional and newly recognized suicide risk factors in patients with mood disorders. RECENT FINDINGS Current research findings clearly suggest that suicidal behaviour in patients with mood disorder is a 'state-dependent' phenomenon. Recently, there is, however, a growing body of evidence that besides the well accepted clinically e...

BACKGROUND General population data were used to study co-morbidities between lifetime social phobia and mood disorders. METHODS Data come from the US National Comorbidity Survey (NCS). RESULTS Strong associations exist between lifetime social phobia and major depressive disorder (odds ratio 2.9), dysthymia (2.7) and bipolar disorder (5.9). Odds ratios increase in magnitude with number of so...

Background: Training methods to reduce the anxiety caused by the electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) should match the necessity of communicating with the patients suffering from mood disorders. Aim: This study aimed to compare the effects of face-to-face and multimedia education on the anxiety induced by the ECT. Method: This randomized controlled clinical trial was conducted on 75 patients with mo...