Assessing and Distinguishing Between Depression, Borderline, or Bipolar

About this event

3 CEUs

Live via Zoom

Clinicians are seeing an increasing number of adolescents and young adults who, in spite of treatment with multiple antidepressants and a variety of other medications, remain mired in depression, often accompanied by irritability, anxiety, and distractibility. These individuals often lament that they “have tried every drug there is” without substantial or sustained benefit.

One reason for their predicament is that many of them are not simply depressed. At least 40 percent of them actually have unrecognized bipolar illness. Antidepressants have been shown to be only marginally better than placebo in acute bipolar depression and have been proven ineffective in preventing future depressive episodes in those with bipolar illness. Some bipolar patients can become more irritable, agitated, and suicidal on antidepressants or will, paradoxically, have more frequent depressive episodes. Effective psychotherapy often proves to be difficult, if not impossible, when bipolar patients are misdiagnosed and inappropriately treated with antidepressants.

This webinar will provide clinicians with a four-part, clinical diagnostic method to distinguish patients with borderline personality and major depressive disorder from those with bipolar illness. Clinicians will learn about the medications that should form the foundation of treatment for bipolar illness, including the one medication that has been repeatedly shown to dramatically reduce the risk of completed suicide. They will also learn about potent, non-drug treatments for depression, mania, and rapid-cycling that they can put to immediate use in their practices.

Those attending this webinar will learn the following:

• The four lines of clinical evidence that must be assessed to distinguish bipolar depression from major depressive disorder and borderline personality.

• Key elements of empirically-tested psychotherapies for bipolar illness

• The research showing why antidepressants are the wrong treatment for bipolar depression

• The one drug repeatedly shown to dramatically reduce the risk of suicide

• Why atypical antipsychotics should not be used in place of lithium and other mood stabilizers proven to prevent new episodes of depression and mania

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Brian Quinn, LCSW, Ph.D. author of Wiley Concise Guides to Mental Health: Bipolar Disorder and The Depression Sourcebook, 2nd ed., is a clinical social worker in private practice in Melville, New York. He specializes in working with patients with mood illnesses and substance abuse.

He earned his master’s degree in social work at the University of Chicago in 1979 and his Ph.D. in clinical social work at New York University in 1994. He has a post-graduate certificate in psychoanalytic psychotherapy from Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. He is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Tufts Medical Center.

Dr. Quinn has given seminars on depression and bipolar disorder at hospitals, graduate schools of social work, state societies for clinical social work, and to hundreds of clinicians in the United States with the help of professional seminar companies such as PESI.

ABOUT THE EVENT

This workshop will take place via Zoom. Access information will be shared via email at least 48 hours prior to the start of the course. The workshop will not be recorded.