Abstract:

Bipolar disorder is a common mental illness with complicated clinical features and variant depressive/manic episode, resulting in under-recognition, misdiagnosis, and inappropriate treatment. Therefore, a series of researches have been carried out to explore its essential features and characteristics. Further more, diagnostic criteria and treatment principals have been modified based on the findings from evidence-based medicine. This paper reviews the current researches on bipolar disorder and their prospects from perspectives such as concepts and diagnoses, neurobiology research progresses, as well as the mood stabilizers treatment.

Key words: bipolar disorder, diagnosis, the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, neurobiology, mood stabilizer