Lived experience at the core: A classification system for risk-taking behaviours in bipolar

Abstract

Objective Clinical observations suggest that individuals with a diagnosis of bipolar face difficulties regulating emotions and impairments to their cognitive processing, which can contribute to high-risk behaviours. However, there are few studies which explore the types of risk-taking behaviour that manifest in reality and evidence suggests that there is currently not enough support for the management of these behaviours. This study examined the types of risk-taking behaviours described by people who live with bipolar and their access to support for these behaviours. Methods Semi-structured interviews were conducted with n = 18 participants with a lived experience of bipolar and n = 5 healthcare professionals. The interviews comprised open-ended questions and a Likert-item questionnaire. The responses to the interview questions were analysed using content analysis and corpus linguistic methods to develop a classification system of risk-taking behaviours. The Likert-item questionnaire was analysed statistically and insights from the questionnaire were incorporated into the classification system. Results Our classification system includes 39 reported risk-taking behaviours which we manually inferred into six domains of risk-taking. Corpus linguistic and qualitative analysis of the interview data demonstrate that people need more support for risk-taking behaviours and that aside from suicide, self-harm and excessive spending, many behaviours are not routinely monitored. Conclusion This study shows that people living with bipolar report the need for improved access to psychologically informed care, and that a standardised classification system or risk-taking questionnaire could act as a useful elicitation tool for guiding conversations around risk-taking to ensure that opportunities for intervention are not missed. We have also presented a novel methodological framework which demonstrates the utility of computational linguistic methods for the analysis of health research data.