Bipolar disorder is a common and often disabling major mental illness. It account for a high proportion of idiopathic psychotic illnesses. Antipsychotic, mood-stabilizing and antidepressant drugs are very effective in managing many prominent and distressing symptoms of these illnesses, but as many as one-third of medically treated patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder relapses after hospitalization, this calls for the use of an adjunctive psychosocial treatments like solution focused Brief therapy. This is a pre-test, post-test and control design structure in 2 x 2 factorial paradigm. Subjects were randomly selected and divided into experimental and control groups. The patients were administered with General Behaviour Inventory (GBI) a 73 item questionnaire (Depue et al, 1985). Three Hypotheses were set and tested and analysis was carried out using student “t” test at 0.05 level of significance. The subjects exposed to the brief solution focused therapy performed better than the control. The patient with Dysthymic disorder performed better when exposed to solution focused brief therapy. The patients with Bipolar were found to improve better when exposed to the therapy. The improvement was shown in the differences observed in the means of the statistical analysis. Women exposed to solution-focused therapy improved better than their men counterparts. It was concluded that adjunctive psychological management by psychiatric nurses should be offered simultaneously with the pharmacological management.
Keywords: Bipolar Disorders, Efficacy, Management, Ondo General Behaviour Inventory (GBI), SFBT
