VIDEO: Looking ‘beyond the standard treatments’ in bipolar depression

In a video interview, Lyons Hardy, MS, RN, P-MHNP, discussed a presentation on moving beyond the standard treatment paradigm for bipolar depression given at the American Psychiatric Nurses Association Annual Conference.

Hardy, clinical assistant professor and concentration lead of the Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner Program at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Nursing, and co-presenter Brian McCarthy, MSN, talked about later line treatments to use in bipolar depression when first- and second-line treatments fail or are poorly tolerated. These included pharmacologic options, like anti-inflammatory drugs and dopaminergic agents, and non-pharmacologic options, like light therapy and the MIND diet.

“I think that the idea is just that we have some other options to try,” Hardy told Healio. “We don’t have to keep going through using all the medications in the same class and finding new ones in the same class; there’s some other ways that we can look at this illness and how we can treat it.”