Medication compliance in patients with bipolar disorder

Clinicians treating bipolar disorder must be aware of the complex interaction of sociocultural, patient, illness, and medication effects on compliance to a regimen of lithium salts. They must also be aware of this subtle influence on compliance of their own unconscious attitudes toward this illness and its treatment. There has been tacit acknowledgement in recent years that, in as many as a third of patients, lithium alone may not be enough (even assuming vigorous psychopharmacotherapy). Early optimism about lithium's ability to cure all was an understandable reaction to its remarkable ability to prevent a devastating disorder.