Mood Disorder: Suicide

Mood Disorder: Suicide
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Introduction
Many of us experience moments of dejection and during such periods life seems grey and nothing appears worthy doing. On the other hand, some have experienced the opposite state that is a mood of euphoria, excitement, and recklessness where one becomes feverishly active and think we can accomplish anything. This is depression and mania that occur mildly and temporarily in our daily lives. However, in other individuals such shifts in mood are prolonged and extreme in that the individual’s life becomes extremely disrupted. Such conditions are mood or affective disorders (Yang, 2011).
Moods are the state of feelings that cover our coloring our psychological lives. Therefore, mood disorders are emotional disturbances of the emotions that spill over into almost every other aspect of life. Such disorders affect how people think, behave, care for themselves, and overall health. In this sense, mood disorders are total body disorders. Mood disorders are characterized by mood dysregulation that is pervasive and psychomotor activity and related biorhythmic and cognitive disturbances (Yang, 2011).
The rubric of affective disorder that in some European classifications that subsume morbid states of anxiety is being replaced by the nosologically and increasingly delimited concept of mood disorder. Therefore, today, mood disorder is the preferred term by the WHO’s ICD-10 and APA’s DSM-V. The major categories of mood disorders are bipolar disorders with characteristic manic or hypomanic (depressive, or mixed episodes of these) and depression and its respective attenuated variant of major depressive disorders such as cyclothymic and dysthymic disorders. However, this paper will focus on bipolar disorder (Yang, 2011).
Bipolar Disorder
Bipolar disorder describes a set of mood swing conditions with the most severe form being manic depressive form. There is a variability of moods within the population with the condition and bipolar disorders are classified per the severity and nature of mood variation (Geddes, 2010). Understanding psychological mechanisms underlying bipolar disorder are complicated by the multifaceted, dynamic, and always shifting nature of experienced symptoms by patients (Pavlickova et al., 2013). For example, although the term "bipolar disorder" inherently implies that depression and mania are at extreme ends to each other on the spectrum of affect. When cross-sectional comparison is made, the two sets of symptoms are on different dimensions in regards to psychopathology so that they can simultaneously depressed and manic. This is why patients may present with mixed episodes (Pavlickova et al., 2013).
In addition, reports indicate that mood in bipolar patients mood may chaotically fluctuate over short periods of time. Longitudinal studies indicate that individuals having manic and depressive symptoms independently vary with eac...