Talk:Bipolar disorder

GA Reassessment

Bipolar disorder

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Delisted. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:45, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

buidhe placed the {{GAR request}} template on this 2012 listing with the edit summary "fails WP:MEDRS due to dated sources. Major updates needed". ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:19, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

It was actually promoted in 2020, but some of the sources seem excessively dated. (t · c) buidhe 01:55, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

The text has not been maintained current. Some samples from this version:

• "Bipolar disorder is the sixth leading cause of disability worldwide" ... See WHO on 2019 disability
• However, a reanalysis of data from the National Epidemiological Catchment Area survey in the United States suggested ... cited to 2003, followed by ... A more recent analysis of data ... cited to 2007.

And this confusing bit of "prose" in "Resistance to treatment" wasn't in the GA version; it doesn't appear the article has been watched, updated and tended in the three years since its GA listing, so there could be deeper problems. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:53, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

More items on 'complications'

Suicide and self-harm are far from being the only complications of bipolar disorder. I advise adding more.

As stated in the article, around 30% of people with BD have financial, social or work-related problems due to the condition. There are also higher rates of other serious medical comorbidities including diabetes mellitus, respiratory diseases, HIV, and hepatitis C virus infection and reduced attentional and executive capabilities and impaired memory.

These seem to me as being obvious complications and impairments caused by bipolar disorder. Why are they not listed as a complications? CalmSandals (talk) 04:05, 28 December 2025 (UTC)

Hi @CalmSandals, do you have sources that indicate other complications of bipolar disorder (other than those already described in the article)? ShillAwayAsSeenOnTV (talk) 17:47, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Does it really exist?

Is there any biological proof for this illness? Any genetic data? Because otherwise, it would be important to mention criticism of the label. ~2025-43043-70 (talk) 12:36, 28 December 2025 (UTC)

What do you mean by proof? Exact etiology? If it's that, it is unknown, but so is this the case for autism spectrum disorder and Alzheimer's disease.

There is plenty of genetic data, though (though none are consensually regarded as causal). Check biology of bipolar disorder, if you haven't.

There is also this recent study which uses statistics and gene mapping to determine likely causal SNPs of bipolar disorder. CalmSandals (talk) 14:37, 28 December 2025 (UTC)

@~2025-43043-70 bipolar disorder, along with schizophrenia are highly heritable. It is also important to know that bipolar disorder, along with recurrent unipolar depression, used to be part of the larger concept of manic depressive illness until DSM III in 1980. The main textbook on bipolar disorder by Goodwin and Jamison is actually entitled 'Manic Depressive Illness' rather than 'bipolar disorder', though the use of the term bipolar disorder is common and is the name used in DSM III through the current revision of DSM V. P3829 (talk) 18:27, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

These are categories used to help people, sometimes misused by patients and doctors alike, often very useful for determining potential treatments. Hopefully with Biomarkers, they will change the names, identifying real illnesses which we understand, and if they keep them, the conditions still factually won't really be the same as before (just with the same name). Bipolar, because it's cyclic, is obviously more “observable” than whatever people diagnosed with personality disorders “have” (if they indeed have something) or ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. So, Bipolar most likely exists in the less-mild cases, but we don't understand it yet. This is often not put forward enough on Wikipedia, but research will probably change the way we think about mental health regardless of what associations and the like might continue to say. ~2026-10945-82 (talk) 12:45, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

Having read through the prior comments (please see timestamp):

I disagree with @~2026-10945-82 saying that bipolar disorder (BD) is 'more observable' than personality disorders due to some 'cyclic' property that BD hypothetically has but personality disorders don't. This property isn't relevant; diagnosing either BD or personality disorders both (currently) involve observing a patient's clinical presentation and checking off the relevant criteria. I welcome debate on the reliability of the criteria in terms of internal consistency (such as measured by Cronbach's alpha) and inter-rater reliability.

While I do not explicitly disagree with @CalmSandals and @P3829, I caution you to carefully interpret the meaning of 'heritability', defined in the wiki article as (ideally; when cov(G,E)=0) the ratio of variance in genetics to variance in a phenotype. Especially note that genetics and environment often has non-zero covariance, thereby introducing confounding which complicates the process of causal inference.

Finally, consider these philosophy of medicine articles by Peter Hucklenbroich:

- 'Disease Entities and the Borderline between Health and Disease:Where is the Place of Gradations?'

- '“Disease entity” as the key theoretical concept of medicine'

Hot take: mania is real, bipolar disorder is up for philosophical debate and re-definition to make it more 'real' in the sense of full characterization as a bio-psycho-social disorder and definitional distinction relative to other conditions. ShillAwayAsSeenOnTV (talk) 19:08, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Hypersexuality should be better addressed in this article

Hypersexuality (HB) is a serious symptom of BD that is both overlooked and under-researched, as noted by Harvey D. et al. (2025). It is listed as a diagnostic criteria on the DSM-V and is featured on the mania article as a complication. Most (if not all) of statistical research conducted on bipolar hypersexuality that I have encountered has been either made by or attributed to Bipolar UK, while clinical research was being arranged by The Bipolar Disorder Research Network (BDRN), meaning, to me, that there has been little worldwide interest in this problem.

Reeve-Foster, J. et al. (2025) have found that HB affected ~74.3 of BDRN participants. In the Bipolar UK survey, 34.3% of responders were victims of sexual assault, 22.3% of rape, and 14.8% attempted suicide. Women were disproportionately more likely than men to experience sexual assault or rape. Over half (56.7%) of responders had never been asked about HB by a healthcare professional.

The researchers interpreted the data as being evidence that there is negligence on HB within clinical settings, which disallows sufferers to seek medical treatment. They have also pointed out that the diagnostic system terminology should be updated and psychoeducation should include the topic of HB.

Harvey D. et al. (2025) also acknowledges a recent survey by The Bipolar Commission revealing that nearly 90% of participants experienced HB, with over 50% of participants reporting 8 or more episodes of HB over the course of their lifetime. The researchers also tried to framework HB in the case of BD, being it often described in the context of fluctuating mood states and sometimes framed by feelings of shame and judgement, which contribute to the stigma surrounding this issue.

With all of this said, this article only mentions the word 'hypersexuality' once, and doesn't try to define how it might be important to the symptomatology of BD. I recommend the symptom being better introduced here and in the article of mania. I would also recommend listing it as a complication here, given how severe it is.

Please share your thoughts. CalmSandals (talk) 13:26, 19 January 2026 (UTC)

Hi there @CalmSandals, I think that hypersexual behavior (HB) is actually a symptom associated with underlying PTSD in bipolar disorder (BD). So I agree that HB does occur more commonly in people diagnosed with bipolar disorder than otherwise, but I disagree with calling it a symptom of BD.

Before I bring more sources into the mix to justify my position, let me address the two sources you bring up.

The study by Harvey and others, as you say, 'notes' that hypersexuality is more likely in people with mania or hypomania. But this was not the primary subject of their article (it was about thematic analysis of Reddit posts). So Harvey and others refer to another study (their source number 12; "Bipolar UK. Hypersexuality as a symptom of bipolar. 2024. Accessed October 15, 2024." in their introduction to claim prevalence of hypersexuality in people diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The link they provide is broken, but I found this link to Bipolar UK that takes you to the article cited. This article itself refers to an article in "The Lancet Psychiatry" by the "Bipolar Commission" (the rabbit hole goes ever deeper) to back up its 88% HB in BD prevalance figure. It does not cite this article or give a DOI. Looking at a Dr. C Dolman's Google Scholar page, Dolman's articles also use corpuses from Reddit to study hypersexuality... but nothing about a proper epidemiological study, chart review, or the like to establish a prevalence rate of HB in BD. Except for the article you already mentioned by Reeve-Foster and others.

So then we look at the Reeve-Foster and others article, and we find that it is in preprint, meaning it has not yet passed peer-reviewed. Here are the search results from Google Scholar on that.

With all that out of the way, there are a few papers linking PTSD to compulsive sexual behavior (CSB, a related term to HB) in the military. Here are a few, and out of these I have taken a closer look at Smith and others (2014). Moreover, BD is under-diagnosed in veterans with combat PTSD per McLay and others (2014).

So I get where you are coming from in wanting this mentioned as a symptom of BD (for awareness of a common, co-occurring phenomenon), but I think that hypersexuality is better off mentioned in the article on PTSD than BD. And with this, it should be noted that authors disagree on how hypersexuality / compulsive sexual behavior should be defined.

Hope this helps and hope to hear back from you soon. ShillAwayAsSeenOnTV (talk) 23:58, 27 March 2026 (UTC)

@CalmSandals Can you also provide a link to the Bipolar UK survey on sexual assault, rape, and suicide attempt? All I'm finding in the article about this is the preprint by Reeve-Foster.

For the record, it is important to study how people with BD are victims of violent crime. I just want to know what sources you have on this. ShillAwayAsSeenOnTV (talk) 00:14, 28 March 2026 (UTC)