Seasickness patches tested as treatment for bipolar disorder

The disorder features episodes of boosted energy and
restlessness followed by episodes of depression.

NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists are testing seasickness patches and other surprising options in a challenging search for new ways to treat the crushing depression and uncontrolled mania of bipolar disorder.

Also called manic-depression, it’s an illness that can rip careers and marriages apart and drive people to suicide. And it’s so complex and mysterious that researchers haven’t developed a medication specifically for it since lithium, more than half a century ago.

Yet bipolar appears in various forms and severity in about 1 in every 25 American adults at some point in their lives, according to a major study published in May.

Current medicines help, but often fall short.

They “certainly reduce symptoms but don’t do a good enough job,” said Dr. Husseini Manji of the National Institute of Mental Health. “Many patients are helped, but they’re not well.”

Nobody knows yet whether the latest crop of possible treatments will pan out. Besides the motion sickness patch, unusual choices include a drug that treats Lou Gehrig’s disease and a device that produces an electric field around the brain. Even the breast cancer drug tamoxifen has been tested.

Some of these approaches were identified by logic, and others by pure chance. Scientists already have early evidence that someday they may prove useful against bipolar.

Mania

The disorder’s classic feature is episodes of mania, which are periods of boosted energy and restlessness that can run for a week or more.

“You have so much energy, you have so many great ideas” said Tamara, 26, a Pittsburgh resident who was diagnosed several years ago. She asked that her last name not be used.

“You feel like you’re thinking so clear, you’ve got the answer for everybody. You need to tell them, you need to phone all your friends... It’s so hard to sleep. You keep thinking of all sorts of things.”

But mania can also bring extreme irritability. Tamara’s energetic charisma made her the life of the party, but “if somebody spilled a drink on me, I would just explode,” she recalled. “It’s like all your emotions are just completely intensified.”

She got into fights and experienced road rage. She made bad decisions, plagiarizing a college paper and behaving promiscuously.

“A lot of things sound like a good idea when you’re manic,” she said, “and they’re really not.”

During manic episodes many people even get hallucinations or delusions, and Tamara experienced those too. “I was convinced I could hear other people’s thoughts, or at least know what they were,” she recalled. “I thought everybody was saying bad things about me.”

The downside

The other side of the bipolar coin is episodes of depression that last a week or more. For Tamara, depression was life turning gray.

“Nothing is interesting. You’re bored with everything... Nothing sounds fun anymore. All you want to do is sleep. I slept days and days away.”

In her senior year of college, thoughts of suicide frightened her into seeking help.

Doctors currently treat bipolar with a variety of drugs including lithium, anticonvulsant medications that can stabilize mood, and antipsychotics. Psychological therapy and patient education greatly boost the effectiveness of the drugs.

Tamara takes lithium and another drug, and says, “I’m doing fine right now.”

She’s lucky. Bipolar disorder is hard to treat chiefly because the depressive episodes are more severe and more resistant to therapy than ordinary “unipolar” depression, notes Dr. Andrea Fagiolini, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.

What’s more, many patients can’t tolerate current bipolar medications because of side effects like weight gain, sleepiness, tremor, and the sense of feeling “drugged,” Fagiolini said. Some patients also stop taking their medicine because they miss the “highs” of the disease, he noted.