Depression is highly recurrent in Bipolar patients, causes more disability than other manifestations of the illness and depressive symptoms predominate over manic and hypomanic symptoms. Our aim is to describe whether in our sample we can find some specific differences from the early course of the illness.

33 patients meeting DSM-IV criteria of Bipolar Disorder I and II whose illness onset was less than 5 years from the first Manic/ hyponamic episode or/and less than 10years from the index depressive episode. Recorded variables included socio-demographic, clinical, treatment characteristics and scales (HRSD, YMRS, BPRS, GAF).Analysis was performed using SPSS Version 12.0.

57.6% were male, 42.4% female, mean age 34.42 years. 2 Patients (6.2%) were depressed when inclusion and 8.8% had had a depressive episode before were included in our Program.

The mean number of depressive episodes was 1.88 (SD 3.58). Only 1 patient had had self-harm intent. 15.2% has first degree family history of Unipolar depressive disorder and 20% of Bipolar disorder. 6.2% were hospitalized because a depressive episode.

We found less rates of depressive episodes than we found in the literature with less sub-syndromal and syndromal depressive symptoms than in routine bipolar population that could be explained by the short course of the illness in our sample. More research should be done to study bipolar depression in early phases to find predictors that help us to decrease the high impact it has in the disorder.