Gender remains an important determinant of psychological fitness and psychiatric disorders. Biological vulnerabilities may be accentuated and exacerbated by interaction of gender and social determinants. Sex differences in age of commencement of psychiatric disorders, their course, symptom presentation, comorbidity rates and treatment response have been reported consistently in bipolar disorder. Few workers evaluating differences, according to sex, in presenting symptoms of mania have reported men with mania exhibit higher prevalence of problems in behavior and are able to converse with difficulty. In contrast, female patients even during mania show higher amount of symptoms of depression. More recently women with mania were reported to have higher scores on lability of mood, depression, anxiety, guilt and suicidal thoughts while men obtained higher scores on humor, grandiose ideation, psychosis and motor activity. The finding of clinical differences in mania according to gender emphasizes the need for large scale studies on patients with bipolar disorders to firmly establish whether there exist clinical differences in symptomatology according to gender and measures to improve compliance with treatment. There is a pressing requirement to evaluate the safety of different treatment modalities during pregnancy.

Keywords: Gender; Sex; Mania; Bipolar Disorder.