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Questions re: Self-Injury
Hi Dr. Phelps,
My son is mildly self injuring and I was wondering if you in general increase
mood stabilzers ,other medications, or add antipsychotics when a patient of
yours is self injuring? Or do you address it in other ways? Do you see patients
that self injure more in their depression cycle or their hypo/manic cycle? Do
many of your bipolar patients self injure? Any other comments or help on self
injury would be helpful...Thank You
Dear Ms. B' --
Self injury is relatively common in people with intense symptoms, in my
experience. I put a link to a
wonderful
site on self-harm on my site several years ago for this reason.
However, there is not much of a literature on bipolar disorder and self-harm
(I just made a simple search; not much emerges). In general it seems to
be quite effective to increase mood stabilizers to help limit the sensations
that lead to this behavior, and in general I have had the sense that in so
doing we are going after the basis of the problem, as opposed to just
trying to treat a symptom.
Dr. Phelps
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