While it affects only 3 percent of the United States’ population, healthyplace.com explores the psychological effects of bipolar disorder. As part of manic episodes, a person experiences different symptoms such as delusions, anxiety, obsessive feelings, racing thoughts, and intense paranoia. The manic periods can last years at a time sometimes and they can include hallucinations.

However, bipolar disorder also has a depressive series of episodes that healthyplace.com explains as periods of “prolonged sadness,” “feeling helpless,” “indifference,” and an inability to focus or take pleasure from interests.

Effects are not only in the episodes themselves. They are in how the person carries themselves on day to day activities. Many people with bipolar disorder have issues with unemployment, low wages, inability to focus or get tasks accomplished, and to maintain relationships, because of the mood swings. However, this tends to be the case for those who are untreated or undiagnosed.

Psych Central brings up other concerns for those who have bipolar disorder and their loved ones. The illness not only affects the patient greatly in daily life. Rick Nauert writes “Bipolar Disorder Affects Daily Life” on Psych Central, where he quotes a national online survey, “In particular, about 9 in 10 patients (89 percent) said they have canceled social engagements because of bipolar depression.”

Not only does it affect their social interactions, but it affects their ability to get work done as well. He writes that many bipolar patients end up stuck in the depressive state more than the manic state, which affects their ability to socialize, to get work done, to actively pursue goals personal or professional. Nauert also notes that while 3% seems like a small number, it accounts for 8 million people in America with bipolar disorder, which puts the number in more perspective. He writes, “61 percent of people with bipolar disorder saying their depressive episodes last longer than their manic episodes.”

And with this much of a feeling of plummeting, bipolar depression disorder has more serious effects than it is portrayed by the media. In “Bipolar Disorder: Quality of Life and the Impact of Atypical Antipsychotics,” an online article published in 2005, we see the effects of this illness from a different angle.

The author writes, “A systematic review of bipolar disorder literature covering the period between 1966 and 1998 found 72 articles on studies of bipolar disorder, of which only 10 included a health-related quality-of-life assessment”

So, while we know a little bit about bipolar disorder, we don’t know, in detail, how it affects people on a day-to-day basis due to, mainly, scientific lack of research along with the negative stigma that this illness has associated with it. However, perhaps with celebrities sharing their experiences, more research will be there to back them up soon!