Bipolar Research Study 2

So today was the yearly bipolar study. This was my fifth year. Some people have been in as long as seven. I was there from about 9 until 12:30. There were lots of "games" to play. Some were fun like the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. In this game, are given five cards with various numbers of colored symbols. You try to match them without having gotten any rules. You are only told "correct" or "incorrect". Just as you get a few in a row "correct", you begin to get more "incorrect" again! The rules change on you. So you may have been matching numbers of symbols on the cards, but now you're matching colors. You have to adapt and figure this out. I think its a fun game! There were other games like letters flashing on a screen and every time you saw an "x", "y", or "z" you were to press the "n" key. And then, you weren't to press it if it showed up twice in a row. Same for another game where there wer various numbers of boxes on a screen. Inside was a blue square. You could find the squares by clicking on the boxes. Your job was to remember where you'd already been and empty the boxes quickly. Then there was remembering lists of things. Of course, my memory got worse as the time went by. When we started, I was showed fifty pages with one drawing of an item, like a park bench or an ice cream cone on each. I was just told to remember them. Then, we went through them again but this time, there was another item on the page with it and I had to say which item was on the original list. This was much easier for me than just remembering lists of words by sound. (We did this, also. With that I had to recall and recite.) I just had to point to the item that did or did not belong to the original 50 items. In fact, throughout this whole exercise, I didn't get one item wrong! And we did it a couple of sets worth, too! There was a test which the object was to identify the emotion in the person's voice. We did this with a tape recorder- the clinition commented on how "old" the machine was! I had to point to either "happy", "sad", "angry", "neutral" or one more I can't remember right now. I also did something similar with a computer with faces flashed quickly at me.

All-in-all, it was a fun time for what it was. Oh, and I got blood drawn, too. I tried to ask what some of the prelimary results were, but they said they're only now starting to get some after 7 years into the study. I know that they are using our genes to see if there is a component and that as of Sept. 2013, there are 927 enrolled. A newletter I got about the study states, "The Heinz C. Prechter Bipolar Genetics Repository and Longitudinal Study of Bipolar Disorder were launched in 2006 and remain the flagship project. The Logitudinal Study will follow individuals over the course of 10 years with the goal of identifying potential illness patterns in bipolar disorder." More at Prechterfund.org