Editorial: Progress in the treatment of bipolar disorder ||FREE PAPER||

Allan Young

Department of Psychiatry, Vancouver, Canada

Bipolar affective disorder has long been recognized as being one of the most significant causes of increased mortality and morbidity due to mental ill health. Bipolar disorder is an evolution of the older concept of manic-depressive illness, which itself was differentiated from dementia praecox/schizophrenia by Kraepelin over 100 years ago. Bipolar disorder was further differentiated from severe unipolar disorder following research in Europe by Angst and Perris and in the US by Winokur in the 1960s. However, unipolar and bipolar disorders are undeniably closely related, with unipolar disorder being the commonest illness in offspring of bipolar parents. Bipolar disorder has itself been subdivided into bipolar I disorder (with a history of mania) and bipolar II disorder (with a history of hypomania).