The possible role of psychological interventions in the treatment of bipolar disorders has followed a course comparable with that of type I bipolar disorders itself, with psychotic symptoms in both the phases. After an initial phase of grandiose psychoanalytic euphoria, in which it was assumed that psychotherapy would play a fundamental role in the treatment of bipolar disorders and that words – or in some cases the absence of words – would “cure” this disorder, neurobiological and pharmacological findings appeared to usher in a serious melancholic phase for psychotherapy in the mid-1970s and 1980s; this age was open not only to pesimism, but to speculation, and just a few open studies with small samples were published. Optimism for psychotherapy in bipolar disorders returned in the 1990s due to two factors:

1 the availability of new drugs effective in treating the disorder, spurring renewed interest in clinical research and treatment;

2 the evidence that certain psychological interventions had proven highly effective in conjunction with drugs for other disorders, such as schizophrenia.

As a result, several teams worldwide refocused on applying psychotherapy to bipolar disorders. Reviews and manuals began to come out in the mid- 1990s, and rigorous randomized clinical studies on the usefulness of various techniques began to appear in 1999.

The psychological interventions proposed for bipolar disorders in the course of history are highly diverse, but the majority of them were published without adequate methodological support, without control groups or blinded reviews of results, and based only on anecdotal descriptions that are difficult to extrapolate (Swartz and Frank, 2001).