Bipolar and menopause

Can being bipolar affect your menopause? How does menapause affect bipolar disorder? Can you have depression and bipolar? Can one have manic episodes without being bipolar?

If you are a woman with bipolar disorder, you may experience a double whammy during a profound time in your life — menopause.

Bipolar Disorder and Menopause: The Estrogen Effect. Now, you surely know that these symptoms have been associated with menopause alone (for basics on that topic, read Menopause and Mood). How might one know if she had “bipolar disorder” also?

That can get pretty tricky. Hormonal imbalances are typically listed among risk factors that trigger or cause bipolar disorder. Just like PMS, menopause is stereo-typically known as a time.

And the overlap of symptoms means that when menopause contributes to a bipolar flare-up, the underlying connection can get overlooked.

It's also known as manic depression or manic depressive disorder. It’s not surprising, then. Little is known about the mood symptom experience of women with bipolar disorder during the menopausal transition (MT).

A study investigates menopausal experiences of women with bipolar disorder and whether mood disturbances are different in those with mood disorders. Menopause is a significant phase in a woman’s life, namely characterized by the end of the menstrual cycle. However, as a result of fluctuating. The sufferer will have periods of feeling exceptionally high and full of energy, called mania, followed by periods of feeling extremely low and depressed. My bipolar symptoms worsened with menopause and I suffered a mixed psychotic episode at the age of 50.

All the more reason to continue treatment with the right. For women living with a mental illness, such as bipolar disorder, little is known about how they experience mood changes during menopause. This study aimed to explore how women with bipolar disorder constructed mood changes during menopause and how this impacted on treatment decisions. OBJECTIVES: Menopause may be a time of increased mood symptoms for some women.

This systematic review aimed to examine the severity of symptoms and prevalence of mood changes in women with bipolar disorder during peri- menopause and post- menopause. Women with a family history of early menopause may experience early menopause themselves. Treatment for cancer with chemotherapy or pelvic radiation therapy has been linked to early menopause.

For women with manic depression passing through menopause , symptoms can worsen due to fluctuating hormone levels.

Consider the neuroendocrinology of menopause when evaluating midlife women for new or worsening mood symptoms. The risk of depression increases during perimenopause, even in women with no history of depression. Fluctuating estrogen levels can cause vasomotor symptoms (VMS) and depression, presenting diagnostic and treatment challenges. What they found was that menopause was associated with increased bipolar symptoms overall and particularly with an increase in depressive symptoms.

But is it Only Estrogen? Estrogen isn’t the only hormone that can affect mental health. Our research found that women with bipolar disorder may be uniquely affected by menopause in many ways.