The History of Bipolar Disease

Bipolar disorder is the umbrella term for a set of psychiatric mood disorders involving alternating or mixed episodes of mania and depression. While data on the disorder's prevalence varies from source to source, it is estimated that bipolar disorder of some sort affects around 2 percent of Americans. In part due to the social stigma often placed on this disorder, individuals with bipolar disorder have a highly elevated risk of social distress and suicide. Although the term and official diagnosis of "bipolar disorder" is only about 50 years old, the disorder itself appears to have existed for much longer.

Earliest Descriptions

• In the second century, a Turkish medical philosopher named Arataeus noticed that symptoms of mania and depression were occasionally linked. In his writings, he described this relationship as being caused by "black bile." In 1025, a Persian physician named Avicenna identified a specific manic-depressive psychosis as separate from other forms of psychological ills. Then, in 1583, the Chinese encyclopedist Gao Lian recognized the disorder in his work Eight Treatises on the Nourishing of Life.

Depression

• Depression itself was unrecognized as an independent condition until Robert Burton's 1650 publication of The Anatomy of Melancholy. In this seminal work, Burton drew from various historical descriptions and theories to claim the state of melancholy as a clinical malady; in doing this, he set the stage for all subsequent research into mood disorders.

Continuing Research

• In the 1850s, two French researchers named Jules Baillarger and Jean-Pierre Falret further shaped the modern idea of bipolar disorder, describing to the French Imperial Academy of Medicine the specific conditions of "folie a double-forme" (dual-form insanity) and "folie circulaire" (circular insanity). Falret also noted that the disease was common within certain families: a genetic link that was proved a century later.

Manic Depression

• In the early 20th century, a German psychiatrist named Emil Kraepelin conducted a lengthy study of untreated sufferers of bipolar disorder. He coined the term "manic depressive psychosis" in 1902. After World War II, scientists began treating manic-depressive patients with lithium carbonate: this marked the first time that any drug had been found to be effective on a psychiatric disorder.

Contemporary Findings

• Until the 1970s, when the National Association of Mental Health was founded, patients with manic depression were likely to be institutionalized rather than treated. In 1980, bipolar disorder replaced manic-depressive disorder in the DSM-III, and research on the disorder gained momentum and funding. Today, scientists are still hard at work to understand the causes, effects and treatments of this multidimensional illness.

Famous Incidences

• Many famous individuals throughout history show traces of the illness in their writings and documents. Biographies of Beethoven, Newton and Dickens suggest that all three men began suffering from bipolar mood swings early in childhood and continued to exhibit signs of the disorder. Other famous people thought to have had the disorder include Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway.