Psychiatric Evaluation and Diagnosis of Virginia Woolf

I have chosen to write about Virginia Woolf, a British novelist who wrote A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, to name a few of her pieces of work. Virginia Woolf was my first introduction to feminist type books. I chose Woolf because she is a fantastic writer and one of my favorites as well. Her unique style of writing, which came to be known as stream-of-consciousness, was influenced by the symptoms she experienced through her bipolar disorder. Many people have heard the word bipolar, but do not realize its full implications. People who know someone with this disorder might understand their irregular behavior as a character flaw, not realizing that people with bipolar mental illness do not have control over their moods.†¦show more content†¦2004). A person may have bipolar if they have had episodes of depression as well as mania, without taking any substances that may trigger these symptons. This paper will focused mostly on Bipolar II since Virginia Woolf would b diagnosed with it if she were alive today. Bipolar II entails having recurrent major depressive episodes with hypomanic episodes. Means that most of the time the person will be depressed and not as likely to have manic episode even though they tend to happen. When manic episodes happen with depressive disorders, more often or stronger, then it is a bipolar I diagnosis. In bipolar II the symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (DSM-IV TR). Severe episodes of depression, but episodes of mania are milder and are known as hypomania. Hypomania is the same symptoms as in mania, except not as severe. Typically periods of symptoms are separated by periods that are symptom free. However, with increasing age or without treatment, the amount of time a patient has symptoms increases and the symptom free time decreases (Kupfer, 2004). Some people could make the error of assuming that bipolar II disorder is less severe than bipolar I disorder because hypomaniac episodes can happen without any distress or impairment. However, this disorder can have the mostShow MoreRelatedEssay on Depression2581 Words   |  11 Pages  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Most people today do not think that depression is an illness. In fact most people think that depression is a moral failure. â€Å"Some 400,000 patients are treated for depression in the United States annually, most as outpatients and most by non-psychiatric physicians† (Hollister, Leo E 80). In 1989, major depression cost the nation at least $27 billion in medical care, worker absenteeism, and related costs. In 2002, â€Å"as many as 14 million people in the United States had symptoms of depression, resulting