Treating bipolar disorder: the dopamine system

Professor Wayne Drevets describes how dopamine receptor antagonists can stop mania. Similarly, enhancing dopamine function can enhance depression.

One other type of information that has implicated the dopamine system in bipolar disorder has been treatment effects. So you can actually stop mania in its tracks sometimes by giving a dopamine receptor antagonist, and so that’s one of the ways we’ll treat acute mania clinically. You can also enhance depression by giving some drugs that would enhance dopamine function, and so that would be another sort of indirect type of evidence that this dopamine system may be functioning too low in depression and too high in mania.