Mania is the medical condition where patients suffer severely elevated moods at all times. Normally it is associated with mood swings when the patient goes through extremely elevated or happy mood at one time and at the other time may feel depressed. However this is not the only condition and Mania can occur without these cyclical episodes.
How do I know I have Mania?
Although some one who is not suffering from the disease may fail to understand what the big deal is all about since the patient is happy at all times, people afflicted by it lose their judgment as a result of being over powered by feelings of joy at all times and end up taking wrong decisions and keep getting into socially uncomfortable situations as a result of this. Manic patients often get irritable, belligerent and deny there is anything wrong with them when pointed out the obvious disconnect that their behavior shows with the situation prevailing at that particular time.
Some of the prominent symptoms of Mania are given below:
The patients feel decreased need of sleep and will be hyperactive, hypersexual and hyper religious.
The afflicted person has got grandiose ideas and plans and finds himself to be unusually talkative.
There are other behavior that the person suffering from Mania displays like wasteful expenditure, risky liaisons in personal and business life as well as very vocal and violent arguments.
Mania patients fail to recognize signs of sadness in the facial expression of others, while they can easily recognize expressions of happiness the expression of sadness fails to register in their minds.
There is a mnemonic which is used to describe Mania - DIGFAST
D = Distractibility (Difficulty to concentrate on one thing)
I = Indiscretion (indulging in excessive pleasure activities)
G = Grandiosity (having grand notions and making grand plans)
F = Flight of ideas (having a flurry of ideas and feeling the need to slow down)
A = Activity increased (getting hyperactive emotionally and physically)
S = Sleep deficit (not getting enough sleep and continually going through a dazed state)
T = Talkativeness (the pressure and tendency to speak incessantly and needlessly)
Can Mania be treated?
Mania can be treated by medication and talk therapy, however before that it is necessary to diagnose it correctly. This is because most of the symptoms mentioned can occur due to non psychiatric reasons and something known as differential diagnosis needs to be performed. What happens in this type of diagnosis is the various symptoms of the patients are observed and then a list of diseases is mapped according to the symptoms. Then the doctors start off their treatment and analyze which is the treatment that the patient is responding to the best.
In cases of acute mania patient may also have to be admitted for treatment involuntarily and is typically treated with mood stabilizers and antipsychotic medication. But invariably all of these medicines have side effects and the patient has to be carefully observed to avoid any side effects. Even while the symptoms of Mania have subsided long term treatment still continues in a bid to stabilize the patient's mood through a combination of medicine and talk therapy.
Collective Mania
Collective Mania is a state where a large number of people start behaving irrationally, the numbers can in some cases be as large as an entire country as in the case of Tulip Mania. Such cases can be often witnessed in some of the stock market rallies that happen where the stock prices reach very high levels but despite repeated warnings from analysts people keep on buying without any apparent reason to do so.
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