Journal of Psychiatry

Theory of mind in Bipolar disorder: A study in remission

Euro Global Summit and Medicare Expo on Psychiatry

July 20-22, 2015 Barcelona, Spain

Shravani Chauhan1 and Sudhir Kumar2

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: J Psychiatry

Abstract:

Objectives: Bipolar disorder is characterised by cognitive deficits and deficits in social functioning both during acute stages and in clinical remission. One concept used to examine the underlying mechanisms of social impairment in neuropsychiatric disorders is social cognition, involving the ability to understand and respond to the thoughts and feelings of others. Thus, Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to represent one?s own and others mental states, has been an important area of research in bipolar affective disorder. Results have been mixed so far, mainly due to possible confounding effects of neurocognition, as well as clinical factors such as stage of illness and current mood. The present study explores ToM in bipolar disorder patients during the stage of clinical remission. Method: 20 patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder according to ICD-10, currently in remission and 20 healthy controls were recruited. Remission was determined by 3 month symptom-free period clinically and with YMRS scores< 4 and HAM-D score < 7. The Faux Pas test was used for ToM assessment. In this test, the subject is read 10 stories containing social faux pas and 10 control stories containing minor conflict, but no faux pas. The subject is required to identify the faux pas by taking perspective of the other person?s mental state. The data was analyzed using the computer software program, Statistical Package for Social Sciences-version 11.5 (SPSS-11.5) for Windows�, with different parametric and nonparametric tests, as indicated. The level of significance was taken as p < 0.05 (two tailed). Results: There was significant difference in performance on faux pas stories in patient population as compared to controls. Bipolar disorder patients failed to recognize the faux pas committed by the characters in the stories. There was no significant difference in performance of the control stories in patient population as compared to controls. There was no correlation of poor performance on faux pas stories and clinical characteristics of patients like age, education, age of onset of illness, duration of illness, duration of remission, positive family history, YMRS and HAM-D scores. Conclusions: The study revealed deficits in recognizing social cues by bipolar patients as compared to normal controls. Similar performance on control stories indicate that there is no difficulty in understanding a regular social context. This deficit seen in remission phase indicates that social cognition remains impaired in bipolar patients even after apparent clinical recovery.