GatsbyLuvr1920 Senior Veteran (female)



Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: USA Posts: 1,871

Re: schizoaffective disorder vs. bipolar 1 Well, schizoaffective disorder usually needs more medications to be treated, simply because it's like two serious psychiatric disorders combined into one. The logical treatment approach would be to have the person on both a mood stabilizer and an anti-psychotic. I suppose that the person could just be on an atypical anti-psychotic because they are being used more often now in the treatment of bipolar disorder, but I'd imagine that using both would be the first approach. Just like with regular bipolar disorder, the moods in schizoaffective disorder need to be played around with, when it comes to medication. For most, Lithium would be the best choice because the schizoaffective usualy would be psychotic during mania, making them have bipolar I symptomatology. However, Lithium doesn't always work. They may have to try the anti-epileptics, like Depakote or Tegretol or one of the other mood stabilizers like Lamictal, especially if they would only have bipolar II symptomatology and not become manic at all (and thus, not psychotic) and/or have psychotic depression. I actually have never heard whether a schizoaffective could have only hypomania and have the bipolar half of their condition be like bipolar II. Just like any other psychiatric disorder, it's really just trial-and-error to find what works best for the individual's brain chemistry.

-GatsbyLuvr1920- __________________

"Not everything that steps out of line, and thus 'abnormal,' must necessarily be 'inferior.'"

-Hans Asperger Last edited by GatsbyLuvr1920; 10-14-2006 at 06:33 AM .