Bipolar Disorder: A Guide for Patients and Families

This book is a must-read and a must-have reference for every health care professional. A great many ailing people could be rescued if the simply stated ideas it contains are passed along to those who need them in a timely and clear manner. Is the book an effective aid to patients and families? That is the question that we, as family members who have lost a loved one to bipolar disorder through suicide—even after he had experienced years of intensive psychiatric attention—attempt to answer here.

This latest effort by Francis Mark Mondimore, M.D., is not something one quickly browses through, nor after reading it does one come away with any sense of reassurance. Still, even the least appreciative among us must be awestruck by this masterpiece of organization, a compendium of pretty much everything that has anything to do with the diagnosis of manic-depression and the disorder's presentation and treatment.

The feelings so powerfully evoked by Kay Redfield Jamison in An Unquiet Mind (1) are nowhere to be found in this more didactic work by her Johns Hopkins colleague. In crisp and almost antiseptically clinical prose, Mondimore tells us the facts, just the facts—indeed, innumerable facts—about this complex, confusing, and too often deadly malady that is both unpredictable and destructive as it wreaks havoc on those who are afflicted as well as on those with whom they come into intimate contact. Their disorder frequently misdiagnosed and inevitably improperly medicated, those seeking help must develop heroic resiliency and willingly submit to trial-and-error sampling of an increasingly wider pharmaceutical array. As we are taken on Mondimore's meticulously crafted pathway through the twists and turns of the mood landscape, as soon as we gain some certainty on some aspect of bipolar disorder we are confronted with shifts, changes, and disquieting ambiguities.

This scholarly work is in no way a road map to anything like cure, happiness, health, or even acceptance. It is a guidebook that makes the going a bit less bewildering as it demystifies the processes available through the healing arts.

Over the course of the book's 23 chapters, Dr. Mondimore leaves little question that there is an enormous need for more and better brain function research. For example, he does an able job of highlighting the special concerns of females experiencing bipolar disorder. From premenstrual syndromes, to postpartum psychoses, to rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, to chemical and hormonal changes during menopause, he touches lightly on it all. However, these topics are covered in so little detail that even the least attentive reader can't help but to come away with the sense that in the book of knowledge about mental disorders there are far too many blank pages—and especially in the case of gender-specific needs, where the closer one looks, the greater the awareness that gender matters and has been seriously neglected.

Yes, families and patients can benefit from this book. It will serve as a good beginning for an exploration that has far to go.

Ms. Weisburd is an educator, composer, and lyricist, and Mr. Weisburd is a television documentarian as well as editor and publisher of the Journal of NAMI-California.