One of the things thats impressive about Sasha is that he has himself taking charge of his own treatment and thats important because treating any medical illness, but especially severe or complicated ones like bipolar disorder, and never as a one way street. Its not just about the doctor curing the illness, its about the doctor and the patient together fighting the illness.Bipolar disorder is when people have severe depressive episodes and mood swings to being high in their mood with either severe mania or milder manic symptoms which we call hypomania and these episodes alternate with each other throughout a persons life. There is a recurrence thats the hallmark of this illness, they always have episode, they always come back, although the episodes also go away and theyre often encouraging patients are quite well.The depressive periods are feeling sad and down and blue and often suicidal, the manic periods are periods of less need for sleep, increases energy over activity, over cooperativeness and sometimes impulsive behavior that can lead to trouble.Some of the early warning signs include changes in sleep patterns and personality changes. Sleep is especially important because patients with bipolar disorder when they start getting manic, one of the first things that happens is that theyll start sleeping less than usual and yet they won't be tired during the daytime and family members can often observe this often subtle change more quickly than others. The other subtle change can be in personality characteristics. For instance, if someone is pretty laid back but suddenly theyre really active a lot really talkative doing lots of things, family members may know that thats just not the way that person usually is and that also could be an early warning sign of mania.If someone thinks that they may have bipolar disorder, theyre probably best off going to a psychiatrist and saying to the psychiatrist, I think I have bipolar disorder and saying where that goes in the interview process.The treatment of bipolar disorder is easy and its hard. Its simple in a sense that mood stabilizers or drugs like lithium for instance has been around for 40 years, everyone knows what it is, everyone knows everything that it does, and its still by far the gold standard treatment for bipolar disorder, nothing has been shown to be more effective that it. So patients need to be on medications like that.The hard part is that those medications do have side effects and some people can't take them, other people when they do take them do experience some decrease in their quality of life because of side effects. For instance with lithium, some people have memory problems, some people have noticeable tremor of the hands and there are some long-term medical risks in terms of the kidney and thyroid function.In the case of bipolar disorder for instance we know that even though we get patients better with their medications for their manic symptoms for instance and even though their manic symptoms will go away, studies have shown completely within six moths to a year and a vast majority of people only about one third of people actually get back to work, and get back to school or return to normal functioning of their lives, which means it's not just enough to take a pill, the patient needs to themselves become part of the process of healing, and what Sasha did is the kind of thing that people need to do. And so moving into a more a quite environment like he did, maybe a very smart thing to do.