Everyone experiences sadness or momentary depression; however, individuals living with bipolar disorder experience extreme bouts of despair and sadness that can be dangerous. According to a new study, when comparing bipolar patients to "unipolar" depressed patients, their brain showed notable differences when attempting to regulate emotions.

The 22-year-old singer and actress Demi Lovato recently shed light on the presence of bipolar disorder in the Latino community. She described her own battle with the mental health condition that triggers extreme mood swings, manic episodes suicidal tendencies, irritability and dependence on antidepressants and other medications.

"Bipolar depression really got my life off track," Lovato said in the PSA. "But today I'm proud to say I am living proof that someone can live, love, and be well with bipolar disorder when they get the education, support, and treatment they need.

"I want to shine a light on the people out there who, like me, are learning to live well with mental illness by getting the right diagnosis and finding the right treatment plan. I want to be the most informed and powerful advocate I can be and to help people find the courage to seek help."

Bipolar disorder and depressive disorder can appear similar on the surface, and they're difficult to distinguish clinically. However, researchers recently scanned the brains of people with clinical depression and individuals with bipolar disorder and measured reactions to emotional photographs that depicted different emotions. New findings could produce an improved method for diagnosing and treating patients with those disorders, according to the report titled "State-Dependent Differences in Emotion Regulation Between Unmedicated Bipolar Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder."

The "State-Dependent Differences" report was published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry and indicated that individuals with bipolar disorder may have difficulty regulating emotions whether happy or sad. Bipolar individuals also have manic episodes that can be destructive, and those destructive episodes conclusively differentiate people with depression from those who have bipolar disorder. 

"In the depressed state, patients with [major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder] differed with regard to happy vs. sad emotion regulation associated with differences in rostral anterior cingulate activity. Patients with [major depressive disorder] regulated sad and happy emotions poorly compared with those with [bipolar disorder] and healthy control participants, while they demonstrated no rostral anterior cingulate difference between happy and sad emotion regulation," the report said.

"In contrast, patients with [bipolar disorder] performed worse than those with [major depressive disorder] on sad emotion regulation but normal on happy emotion regulation, and they demonstrated significantly less rostral anterior cingulate activity while regulating happy compared with sad emotions."

The results and conclusions presented in the report indicated that bipolar patients showed impaired emotion regulation, regardless of emotion type and associated with increased dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity compared with those with major depressive disorder and healthy control participants. However, in a non-depressed state, bipolar patients displayed increased brain activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex region, which is involved in aggressively regulating emotions, suggesting bipolar patient work harder than depressed patients to manage control.

Patients with bipolar disorder performed worse than those with major depressive disorders but normal on happy emotion regulation. The medication-free patients with either condition differ in brain activations during emotion regulation, both while depressed and in remission. The researchers observation of neuropathophysiological mechanisms could prove useful when developing diagnostic tools.