Abilify II: Bipolar Disorder (Mania)

Starting with the FDA Labeled indications.

The Frontier Psychiatrists is a newsletter, and podcast, with occasional videos. It’s written by the Owen Scott Muir, M.D., DFAACAP. As part of my ongoing “farewell to meds” by a physician who has moved his focus to interventional brain stimulation approaches to healing, I have written a series of articles revisiting the data on the medications I was trained to prescribe, with a more skeptical eye. This is a part one article on Abilify, where I take a look at the data for the On-label FDA-approved indications. It’s not that funny, in all fairness.

Today, I’m reviewing the data on the role of Abilify (aripiprazole) in the treatment of individuals with bipolar disorder. I think well of Otsuka, the company that brought Abilify to market. This doesn’t mean they are saints, but they have comported themselves well as far as an outsider, like myself, can know.

Bipolar disorder—the renamed illness that used to be called Manic-Depressive Illness—has episodes of both mania and depression, a…