Bipolar disorder and identity. Systematic review

Abstract

The article was written with the intention of filling the gap in the Polish psychiatric literature, which has not yet found room for the analysis of the phenomenon of bipolar disorder (BD) in terms of consequences that it may have for identity of people diagnosed with it. In order to do that, taking into account absence of the research in Poland, an attempt was made to find all previous reports on this subject in English-language professional journals and monographs. As a result, a detailed description with commentaries was made on five thorough studies of essentially qualitative nature. Although the ‛identity’ was operationalized a little differently in each of them, it addressed each time the question: “Who am I?”, both in phenomenological terms, most often manifested in the loss of a sense of continuity, and cognitive terms, associated with the key elements of self-image. The presented studies revealed a number of threats to identity, more or less specific for BD. The nature of these studies does not allow the generalization of their results, nor answer the question of a scale of the phenomenon. On the other hand, the relative similarity of these results reveals previously overlooked difficulties, potentially frequent and important to more holistic understanding and therapy of people with BD, for which the implications have been summarized in the final part of the text.