Components of an effective treatment for bipolar disorder; A qualitative study

Bipolar disorder is one of the most complicated psychiatric disorders. On the one hand, different theoretical models emphasize different structures and there are serious defects in this area and on the other hand, psychological therapies for bipolar disorder are only added as adjunctive therapy to biological therapies. Thus, our knowledge about this disorder is limited.

The purpose of this study is the extraction of the effective therapeutic factors based on the lived experiences of bipolar patients.

In this experiment, a phenomenological-based qualitative method was used. The data was collected by the semi structured interview and inconvenient sampling. Nine participants from the bipolar spectrum (regardless of the type) were interviewed and through the extraction of the lived experiences, the concepts were extracted.

In this study 5 organizer concepts were extracted. The organizer concepts were: lifestyle (sleeping and awakening, having routines in life, goals and values in life and medicinal adherence), social communications (assigning one’s responsibility to the others, not being understood by the others, being rejected and being humiliated), cognition and non-functional believes (perfectionism, competitiveness, needlessness to others, catastrophic and dependent self-respect), life skills (problem solving, anger control and stress management) and psychological education (disease symptoms, disease causes and following up the disease treatment). These organizer concepts are originally the main factors of an effective therapy.

In order to have an effective therapy for a bipolar person, a multi-dimensional approach should be taken and the interventions should be done in multiple aspects. Such a therapy needs the active participation of both the therapist and the patient. We recommend further longitudinal, qualitative and experimental studies..