Reported by: Wijdan CRWE Newswire Middle East Correspondent

Las Vegas, NV December 31, 2010 (CRWENEWSWIRE) - According to a report published on August 16 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, around 40% Americans diagnosed with major depression, are likely to have what’s known as “subthreshold hypomania”, in which the person goes through manic behavior for a period of less than four days, below the threshold for a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, according to researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Kathleen Merikangas, senior author of study, said that hypomania does not permanently damage people’s lives on a big scale. It can cause them to become more vigorous and lively and sleep less and they get irritated easily and can also result in severe depression, even more than seen in depressed people who are not manic. The research was conducted on more than 50,000 American households by Merikangas, a senior investigator at the NIMH in Bethesda, Md., and her team and it was observed that it is quite probable that people with subthreshold hypomania have a family history of mania, similar to people having bipolar disorder. And so it is also expected that many of these people will suffer from full blown bipolar disorder sometime in their life.

Hypomania causes anxiety and even drug or alcohol abuse, according to the study. Such behavior is expected to last a week or more in a true manic episode. Dr. Gregory Simon, a psychiatrist and mental health researcher at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, said that this study has given new life to the concepts of unipolar depression and bipolar depression and raised lots of questions which still need to be answered. Merikangas advises people to look after their loved ones and keep an eye on the surrounding people as it can help them to save people from getting this disease.
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