Inpatients with bipolar disorder: their quest to understand.

1. The quest to understand how to live with the recurrent, major mental illness of bipolar disease is a pursuit not to be undertaken lightly. 2. Studies related to informational search in any clinical population, medical or psychiatric, are scant. 3. Individual and group work with this population needs to include discussion of how to obtain self-management information when out of the hospital, potential barriers that may be encountered in the pursuit of such information, and adaptive and maladaptive responses to barriers.