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When treating depression in bipolar disorder type II, clinicians speculate about antidepressant-induced switches to hypomania or mania and the potential roles for lithium as treatment and switch-inhibitor. To learn more, researchers enrolled 142 participants with bipolar II depression (54% women; mean illness duration, 8 years) in a four-center, 16-week, acute-treatment trial.
Participants were randomized to lithium (minimum target dose, 900 mg/day), sertraline (minimum target dose, 100 mg/day), or their combination. Exclusions included mixed symptoms, psychosis, suicidality, substance use disorder within 3 months, or past nonresponse to either medication. Rapid-cycling patients (42%) were distributed equally among the treatment arms.
Dropout…