What Are Affective Disorders?

Depression, manic-depression, bipolar disorder – these are some of the names for psychiatric illnesses that psychiatrists call "affective disorders." Psychiatrists use the word "affect" (pronounced with the accent on the first syllable) to refer to the collection of feelings that are more commonly called "mood."

Your mood includes your feelings of happiness or sadness, your state of optimism or pessimism, your feelings of contentedness or dissatisfaction with your situation, even physical feelings such as how fatigued or robust you feel. Your mood is like your emotional "temperature," a set of feelings that expresses your sense of emotional comfort or discomfort.

People with affective disorders (or "mood disorders" as they are also commonly called) have changes in their mood that do not have the usual connection to what is going on in their lives. People with depressive disorders become sad, pessimistic, even hopeless and despairing, even though they may seem to have no reasons for feeling that way. In the abnormal mood state called "mania," a person's mood moves in the opposite direction. He or she feels energized, overconfident, even euphoric. Angry, irritable, agitated mood states can predominate in some patients with affective disorder, or sometimes a strange kind of activated, energized sadness that seems to be depression and mania combined--a poorly understood mood state called a "mixed affective state."

In affective disorders, the mood has a life of its own: a person's moods change spontaneously instead of in reaction to events in their lives. Feelings become intense, erratic and unpredictable as the person's emotional life is hijacked by abnormal changes in mood.

Affective disorders include major depression, characterized by bouts of severe, often suicidal low mood, dysthymic disorder, a smoldering low grade but often unrelenting kind of depression that can go on for years, and various bipolar disorders, in which the individual suffers from extreme high and low moods.

At the Johns Hopkins Affective Disorders Program, our clinicians specialize in the diagnosis and treatment of these illnesses, and our researchers are deeply committed to discovering their causes and improving their treatment.

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