Because of the potential seriousness of these disorders, adequate treatment is important.
However, our current understanding of pathways and mechanisms of protein action is not adequate to classify disorders on that basis, while genetic knowledge has advanced to the point where the old classification was becoming less useful.
Without adequate treatment, depressive disorders in medically ill lead to substantial decrements of quality of life [ 5], longer inpatient treatment, prolonged work disability and inadequate illness behavior (e.g. lack of compliance) and even higher mortality [ 6].
The adaptation of the four-item Strauss Carpenter scale to patients with bipolar disorder has adequate psychometric properties and is an acceptable and very useful instrument, not only for it shortness, but also for its prognostic capacity.
The results obtained in this study showed that the four-item Strauss Carpenter scale for patients with bipolar disorder have adequate psychometric characteristics for this population, both in terms of reliability and validity.
Respondents were considered to have received minimally adequate treatment for bipolar disorder if they had ever used a mood stabilizer (lithium, carbamazepine or valproate) and had received treatment from a psychiatrist or psychologist.
Near 46.6% of the GPs in the current study claimed that they had adequate knowledge about the disorder.
Duration of untreated psychosis was measured as time from psychosis onset until start of adequate treatment for psychotic disorder [ 25].
Patients were eligible for inclusion up to 52 weeks after the start of the first adequate treatment for their disorder and were not considered as First Episode Psychosis (FEP) patients if they had previously been treated with anti-psychotic medication in adequate dosage for more than 12 weeks, or until remission.
"You simply don't have adequate coverage of personality disorders with just a few traits," said Thomas Widiger, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky.
