Social support among individuals with bipolar disorder during euthymic phase: A systematic review

In spite of the recent increase in scientific publications showing an expressive interest in studies about social support, there are still scarce publications regarding this thematic and bipolar disorder, mostly when evaluating the individuals in the state of euthymia. Euthymia referred a state that a bipolar patient does not have signs/symptoms of (hipo)mania or depression, thus assessing individuals in this state may reduce response bias.

The objective of this study is to identify the impact of social support on bipolar disorder in patients in the euthymic phase.

A systematic search of observational studies on PubMed/Medline, PsycINFO, EMBASE, Scopus and Web of Science databases was performed from February 2021 to August 2022.

In total, seven studies fulfilled the eligibility criteria. According to three studies, bipolar disorder patients had lower social support than healthy controls. Contrastingly, one study showed bipolar patients did not have different social support compared to healthy controls.

Even though few papers with low or middle risk of bias were included in this review, we found that not only does social support could act as a protective factor for bipolar patients but also that clinical manifestations of the disorder seem to affect social support. This systematic review suggests the narrowed evidence field with different measures and type of evaluation from studies on social support and bipolar disorder, which highlights the need for further investigations on this theme.