The books
Three books on mood disorders. One for the person who just got the diagnosis and for the family around them, and two for the clinicians who treat it. They don’t read the same way, and they aren’t meant to.
3Books published
See the books
Psychiatrist · Mood disorders
Making the science of mood disorders simple
Mood disorders are the only thing I work on, and bipolar disorder most of all. Every week I read the new research and write up the three findings that actually matter.
2016
On mood disorders since
900,000+
Followers across platforms
114 million
Content views
Dr. Ren Silva, MD · Licensed in Brazil
ISBD (International Society for Bipolar Disorders) member since 2021
A decade dedicated to bipolar disorder
Writing, teaching, building technology and reading the literature. It’s four fronts and one mission: make life better for the people who live with the condition.
Teaching the clinicians
This is the work that multiplies. Every class I finish carries the subject into practices I’ll never set foot in, and reaches patients I’ll never meet.
400+Physicians and psychologists trained
institutoith.com.brThe app and the AI platform
I founded and run Estabiliza, the tracking app that’s free for the person with the diagnosis, and the AI platform that supports the clinician. More than 15,000 people track their mood in it, and it holds over 70,000 check-ins.
80,000+App downloads
appestabiliza.comThe weekly letter
What’s New in Mood Disorders. A search runs against PubMed every morning, and once a week the three findings that survive go out in plain English. It’s short because the filter is strict.
TuesdaysA new letter every week
How it’s writtenThree books, two audiences
One written for the person who’s just been diagnosed and for the family around them. Two written for the clinicians who treat it. The same mission, in two vocabularies.
Bipolar No Mysteries
I wrote it for two people at the same time: the one who just got the diagnosis, and the one who loves them and can’t tell whether what they’re watching is the condition or the person.
It moves from what bipolar disorder is, through the medications and what they’re doing inside the brain, into the rhythms that carry a stable year. No technical term gets past a paragraph without a plain sentence beside it, because a term you can’t picture is a term you won’t keep.
The English edition is its own book, written for an American reader rather than translated from the Portuguese one, and it isn’t out yet. What you can buy today is the Portuguese original, and that’s the edition the rating above belongs to.
02
Foundations of the Specialization in Mood Disorders
Technical volume for physicians and psychologists. Published in Portuguese.
03
Understanding Bipolar Disorder
Editor in chief and scientific coordinator of a collective volume with more than 60 contributing authors, psychiatrists and psychologists. Published in Portuguese.
Every week
I read the journals so the letter can be short
A search runs against PubMed every morning for new work on bipolar and mood disorders. Reviews and opinion pieces don’t make it. Primary studies stay, ranked by journal, quartile and study design. About fourteen papers survive a week, and three of them make the letter. That’s the whole filter.
The letter also says why one study made it and another one didn’t, which is the part an aggregator can’t do for you. Technical terms get a plain sentence beside them, because “individual participant data meta-analysis” means nothing to anybody until somebody says out loud that they went back to the raw numbers instead of the summaries.
14Papers read a week
3Findings that make the letter
Six questions I keep coming back to
Every video, episode and chapter lands somewhere in this list. It hasn’t changed much in ten years, because the questions haven’t.
Bipolar or unipolar
Two depressions that look identical from the outside and pull treatment in opposite directions. It’s the fork with the highest cost of getting it wrong, and on average it isn’t reached for years.
Mania and hypomania
What the diagnosis actually rests on, and why hypomania slips past almost everybody. If a stretch of weeks didn’t feel like a problem, nobody thinks to report it.
Bipolar next to ADHD and borderline
Three conditions that share a symptom list and don’t share much else. Telling them apart is where medical training earns its keep, and it’s the question the internet answers worst.
Medication, and what it really does
What a mood stabilizer is doing in the brain, what it isn’t doing, and how to read the trade between a side effect you can feel today and a relapse you can’t see coming.
Sleep and biological rhythm
The part of treatment that isn’t a pill, and it’s rarely prescribed with any precision. Most stable years are won or lost here, weeks before anything shows up on a symptom scale.
Cognition and function
Concentration, memory and speed after the episode ends. It’s the strongest single predictor of how life actually goes, it doesn’t lift when the mood does, and almost nobody hears about it up front.
I met bipolar disorder as a son before I studied it as a doctor.
Dr. Ren Silva
My mother lives with the condition. For years we didn’t have a name for what was happening at home, and that’s the gap everything on this page keeps trying to close.
The training behind the work
I’m a psychiatrist, licensed in Brazil, and mood disorders are the only thing I work on. Not psychiatry broadly, not mental health broadly. One family of conditions, every day since 2016.
I graduated in medicine at the Federal University of Uberlândia and trained in psychiatry at the University of São Paulo’s teaching hospital in Ribeirão Preto. Everything I’ve built since sits on the same mission: the books, the training programs for clinicians, the app, the podcast and the channels. My work in the United States is educational, editorial and technological.
Academic exchange in medicine
Doctor of Medicine
Psychiatry residency
Clinical research in the mental health graduate program
Member of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders
Start with this week’s letter
What’s New in Mood Disorders goes out every Tuesday morning. It’s three findings from the new research on bipolar disorder and depression, in plain English, written by the psychiatrist who reads the papers.
Get the weekly letterSimplify to transform.