Awareness of illness and subjective experience of cognitive complaints in patients with bipolar I and bipolar II disorder.
OBJECTIVE
The authors' goal was to investigate the awareness of illness and subjective cognitive complaints of patients with either bipolar I disorder or bipolar II disorder during a phase of clinical stabilization.


METHODS
They used a structured clinical interview, the Frankfurt Complaints Questionnaire, to determine subjective cognitive complaints, and the Scale of Unawareness of Mental Disorder to assess 57 consecutively enrolled patients with bipolar I or bipolar II disorder.


RESULTS
Patients with bipolar II disorder had significantly less insight and a higher level of subjective complaints of stimulus overload than patients with bipolar I disorder.


CONCLUSIONS
These results suggest that a severe deficit in self-awareness may constitute a distinguishing psychopathological characteristic of patients with bipolar II disorder. Further studies are required to determine if there are associated neuropsychological dysfunctions.
Neurosciences Institute, Florence, Italy. s.pallanti@agora.stm.it
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Pallanti
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Quercioli
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Pazzagli
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Rossi
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Dell'Osso
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Pini
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Cassano
D000328:Adult; D001294:Attitude to Health; D001364:Awareness; D001714:Bipolar Disorder / Q000145:classification / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales / Q000706:statistics & numerical data