Patients and clinicians can work together to determine appropriate and personally tailored self-management interventions.
Patients and clinicians can work together to determine appropriate and personally tailored self-management interventions.
Patients who have chronic diseases—and their health care providers—are often frustrated or confused by self-management requirements. Those needs involve various aspects of the health care system, and they can be complex. Patients who seek to manage their chronic conditions—and bipolar illness qualifies as chronic—need good tools.
An article that appears in the August 2014 issue of Current Psychiatry Reports reviews evidence-based skills that clinicians and individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) will find useful. Using a comprehensive literature search, they identified the following self-management approaches as sound:
This review also discusses several specific types of self-management resources (workbooks, mobile technologies, and web-based activity logs; Internet interventions, such as support groups; and peer-led interventions).
The authors emphasize personally tailored interventions for each BP patient. They also remind clinicians that self-management of BD augments (as opposed to replaces) medical care, and encourage partnering with patients to promote optimal self-management for individuals with BD.