Excerpt from The Binge Eating & Compulsive Overeating Workbook

Two disturbing trends in the modern diet are also contributing to our culture’s food issues: our reliance on packaged prepared foods high in partially hydrogenated fats and the extensive use of high fructose corn syrup. These trends, along with a lack of physical exercise, have resulted in the current obesity epidemic in our country.

Excerpt from Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder

In my work with people with bipolar disorder, I have found it quite common that they know very little about their illness. Often this is because receiving such a diagnosis can be overwhelming, and people frequently don’t know what questions to ask to best help themselves....

On the other hand, perhaps you are a person who accepts the diagnosis, but you don’t have an accurate understanding of what it means. You might be unsure about what bipolar symptoms are, what might be symptoms of a separate, co-occurring disorder such as anxiety, and what is “normal” and completely unrelated to any disorder. This knowledge is extremely important in order for you to learn what you need to do to prevent relapses (the recurrence of symptoms) and to cope with manic, hypomanic, and depressive episodes. To help you understand what form of the illness you have, I have outlined the current categories of the illness below, as defined by the DSM.

Excerpt from Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder

Part 2 answers:

• What Is Depression?
  
  
• What Is Mania?
  
  
• What Is Hypomania?
  
  
• What Is a Mixed Episode?
  
  
• What Is Psychosis?

Excerpt from Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar disorder is a biological illness that causes unusual shifts in your mood, level of energy, and ability to function in different aspects of your life. This illness used to be called manic depression, because it was thought that people with the illness would fluctuate only between episodes of highly elevated, euphoric moods and episodes of major depression. More recently, doctors have realized that the illness is not quite that black and white—that there are many moods that actually occur on a spectrum. Rather than just experiencing episodes of depression or mania, people with bipolar disorder can in fact experience various moods and symptoms that fall in between these two extremes, and this is why the illness was renamed bipolar disorder, implying that symptoms occur on a spectrum between the two poles of mania and depression.

Excerpt from Rage: A Step-by-Step Guide to Overcoming Explosive Anger by Ronald T. Potter-Efron, MSW, Ph.D.

• Rage is an experience of excessive anger.
• Rage is a transformative experience.
• For every total rage, you probably have several partial rages.
• You may often have near-rage episodes as well.
• Not all rages look alike.
• Another way to divide rages is by the threat that each rage addresses.
• If you are a rager, you aren’t the only one in the world with this problem.
• Rages can be prevented.
• Each kind of rage needs to be treated a little differently.