Bipolar disorder

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Bipolar disorder is a mental illness characterized by alternating periods of depression and mania- a mood disorder characterized excessive elation,irritability , talkativeness, inflated self-esteem and expansiveness. Varying moods and energy levels have been part of human's lives since the beginning of time. The words mania and "melancholia" (an old word for depression) are derived from Ancient Greece. Mania was previously viewed as arising from excess yellow bile, or a mixture of yellow and black bile.

In the 2nd century mania and melancholia were viewed as distinct diseases with separate etiologies. Despite this view Sornanus of Ephesus acknowledged that others considered melancholia a form of mania. A clear understnading of bipolar disorder as a mental illness was recognized by early Chinese authors. The encyclopedist Gao Lian describes the malady in his Eight Treatises on the Nuturing of Life. The earliest written descriptions of a connection between mania and melancholia are attributed to Arataeus of Cappadocia, a medical philosopher who lived in Egypt somewhere between 30AD and 150 AD. He wrote several books refering to a unified concept of manic-depressive illness, viewing melancholia and mania as deriving from black bile.

A Persian physician who wrote the Canon of Medicine in 1025 identified bipolar disorder as a manic depressive psychosis, which he clearly distinguished from other forms of "madness" such as mania, rabies and schizophrenia. (At the time it was commnly believed that people who had these disorders were "crazy".)

The origins of the current definition of manic depressive illness can be traced back to the 1850's. In 1854 Jules Baillarger described to the French Imperial Academy of Medicine a biphasic mentla illness causing recurrent alternations between mania and depression which he termed "dual-form insanity". Two weeks later Jean Pierre Falret presented a description to the academy on what was esesentially the same disorder, calling it "circular insanity." The two men argued over who had been the the first to conceptualize the conditon. Later a German psychaitrist studied the natural ...