A 21st century renaissance – emerging from the ‘dark ages’ in bipolar disorder.
Date: Wednesday 25 June
Time: 11.55am - 1.10pm
Overview
This session explores critical gaps hindering understanding and treatment of bipolar disorder, while highlighting promising new avenues for progress. Affecting approximately 2-4% of the global population, bipolar is a leading cause of reduced psychosocial functioning and severe mood instability, with multiple common comorbidities. Tragically, life expectancy is 15-20 years shorter than the general population. Despite its profound impact, bipolar remains under-researched and generally a low clinical and academic priority – a “step-child” in the under-resourced field of mental healthcare.
Knowledge limitations are pervasive, from understanding core symptoms and diagnostic frameworks to developing targeted treatments. However, with growing optimism, a passionate united expert community — driven by both professional training and lived experience — is poised to usher in a new era. Together, we stand on the brink of a renaissance for bipolar. This session asks how advances in neuroscience, psychopathology, precision psychiatry, lived experience, and data science can fuel this renaissance and help improve outcomes.
Melvin McInnis asks how language and terms describing and linking psychiatric concepts can be used more efficiently for outcomes research. Much data remains ‘dark’, as limited ability to synthesise data across institutional or national boundaries renders it inaccessible. Standardised ontologies offer structured approaches for knowledge integration.
Sameer Jauhur explores emerging themes within the neuroscience underlying bipolar, highlighting key barriers to achieving neuroscientifically-informed classificatory systems. He focuses on neuroimaging and genetics, contrasting this with transdiagnostic findings from large cohorts, including data on depression and schizophrenia.
Tania Gergel highlights key gaps alongside novel insights and pathways to improvement, including increased incorporation of lived experience. Currently, around 15-20% of people with bipolar die by suicide, while delays to bipolar diagnosis and treatment average 5-10 years. We lack satisfactory standardised assessments to organise knowledge of ‘mixed states’, affecting approximately 40-80% of people with bipolar, and associated with both suicide and delayed diagnosis.
In this session you will:
- Build awareness of emerging themes in the neuroscience of bipolar disorder and how neuroscientific approaches may help in creating more targeted diagnosis and treatment of bipolar
- Build awareness of how the international bipolar research community is working together to make use of existing 'dark' datasets and move towards improved phenotyping and precision psychiatry within bipolar
- Build understanding of how to improve approaches towards addressing three key challenges facing both clinicians and those living with bipolar: delayed diagnosis, suicide, and the phenomenology of mixed states
- Build understanding of how the integration of lived experience perspectives are core to making progress in bipolar, both through data collection and through coproduction
Speakers
Chair: Professor Ian Jones, Cardiff University, Cardiff, National Centre for Mental Health, Cardiff
Suicide, delayed diagnosis, and mixed states in bipolar – how to break through the impasse
Dr Tania Gergel, Bipolar UK, London
Towards a neuroscientifically informed classification of bipolar disorder - where are we now, and where do we need to be?
Dr Sameer Jauhur, King's College London, London
Spotlighting dark data in bipolar: what’s the use?
Professor Melvin McInnis, University of Michigan School of Medicine, Ann Arbor, USA
Please email congress@rcpsych.ac.uk or call 020 8618 4120 with any enquiries.