The Relationship Between Bipolar Disorder and Personality

Kopacz, D., L. Grossman & D. Klamen
Published in Health, Education & Research 14 (1): 1-6
1999

Peer Reviewed
Not available online

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Abstract

The relationship between affective illness and personality presents a complicated diagnostic dilemma in which biologic and psychological paradigms overlap. The term personality has been used to include both temperament (the genetic and biologic aspects) and character (the pattern of traits or moral aspects of an individual). The differentiation of enduring personality characteristics from changes that occur during acute illness has been studied in the past from the perspective of trait versus state conceptualizations; however, affect and personality are fundamentally linked because affect is one of the vehicles through which personality is expressed. An implication of viewing symptoms as pathology of either affect or personality is that very different diagnoses, treatments and prognoses are involved.