Bipolar disorder, previously known as manic depression, is a mental disorder characterized by periods of depression and periods of abnormally elevated mood that each last from days to weeks. If the elevated mood is severe or associated with psychosis, it is called mania; if it is less severe, it is called hypomania. During mania, an individual behaves or feels abnormally energetic, happy or irritable, and they often make impulsive decisions with little regard for the consequences. There is usually also a reduced need for sleep during manic phases. During periods of depression, the individual may experience crying and have a negative outlook on life and poor eye contact with others. The risk of suicide is high; over a period of 20 years, 6% of those with bipolar disorder died by suicide, while 30–40% engaged in self-harm. Other mental health issues, such as anxiety disorders and substance use disorders, are commonly associated with bipolar disorder.
Bipolar I disorder is a type of bipolar spectrum disorder characterized by the occurrence of at least one manic episode, with or without mixed or psychotic features. Most people also, at other times, have one or more depressive episodes.
Mania, also known as manic syndrome, is a mental and behavioral disorder defined as a state of abnormally elevated arousal, affect, and energy level, or "a state of heightened overall activation with enhanced affective expression together with lability of affect." During a manic episode, an individual will experience rapidly changing emotions and moods, highly influenced by surrounding stimuli. Although mania is often conceived as a "mirror image" to depression, the heightened mood can be either euphoric or dysphoric. As the mania intensifies, irritability can be more pronounced and result in anxiety or anger.
A mood disorder, also known as an affective disorder, is any of a group of conditions of mental and behavioral disorder where a disturbance in the person's mood is the main underlying feature. The classification is in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD).
Links between creativity and mental health have been extensively discussed and studied by psychologists and other researchers for centuries. Parallels can be drawn to connect creativity to major mental disorders including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, OCD and ADHD. For example, studies have demonstrated correlations between creative occupations and people living with mental illness. There are cases that support the idea that mental illness can aid in creativity, but it is also generally agreed that mental illness does not have to be present for creativity to exist.
Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament is a book by the American psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison examining the relationship between bipolar disorder and artistic creativity. It contains extensive case studies of historic writers, artists, and composers assessed as probably having had cyclothymia, major depressive disorder, or manic-depressive/bipolar disorder.
Cyclical variations in moods and energy levels have been recorded at least as far back as several thousand years. The words "melancholia" and "mania" have their etymologies in Ancient Greek. The word melancholia is derived from melas/μελας, meaning "black", and chole/χολη, meaning "bile" or "gall", indicative of the term's origins in pre-Hippocratic humoral theories. A man known as Aretaeus of Cappadocia has the first records of analyzing the symptoms of depression and mania in the 1st century of Greece. There is documentation that explains how bath salts were used to calm those with manic symptoms and also help those who are dealing with depression. Even today, lithium is used as a treatment to bipolar disorder which is significant because lithium could have been an ingredient in the Greek bath salt. Centuries passed and very little was studied or discovered. It wasn't until the mid-19th century that a French psychiatrist by the name of Jean-Pierre Falret wrote an article describing "circular insanity" and this is believed to be the first recorded diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Years later, in the early 1900s, Emil Kraepelin, a German psychiatrist, analyzed the influence of biology on mental disorders, including bipolar disorder. His studies are still used as the basis of classification of mental disorders today.
Bipolar II disorder (BP-II) is a mood disorder on the bipolar spectrum, characterized by at least one episode of hypomania and at least one episode of major depression. Diagnosis for BP-II requires that the individual must never have experienced a full manic episode. Otherwise, one manic episode meets the criteria for bipolar I disorder (BP-I).
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to abnormal psychology:
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness is a memoir written by American clinical psychologist and bipolar disorder researcher Kay Redfield Jamison and published in 1995. The book details Jamison's experience with bipolar disorder and how it affected her in various areas of her life from childhood up until the writing of the book. Narrated in the first person, the book shows the effect of manic-depressive illness in family and romantic relationships, professional life, and self-awareness, and highlights both the detrimental effects of the illness and the few positive ones. The book was originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in New York and reprinted by Vintage Books in paperback in 1997.
A Summer in the Cage is a 2007 documentary film about a man's experiences with bipolar disorder. The film follows the filmmaker's friend Sam and features an interview with mental health scholar Kay Redfield Jamison. It was directed by Benjamin Selkow. The documentary debuted on the Sundance Channel in 2007.
Frederick King Goodwin was an American psychiatrist and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center, where he was also director of the Center on Neuroscience, Medical Progress, and Society. He was a specialist in bipolar disorder and recurrent depression.
Alexander Bogdan ("Bob") Niculescu, III is a Romanian born, San Diego, California, educated and trained scientist and physician. He is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana, Director of the Laboratory of Neurophenomics, and an Attending Psychiatrist and R&D Investigator at the Indianapolis VA Medical Center. Considered the inventor of Convergent Functional Genomics (CFG), he is a prominent figure in the field of personalized medicine in psychiatry. His early contributions to the psychiatric genetics field include identification of candidate genes, pathways and mechanisms for bipolar disorder using convergent studies In particular, his work and that of his collaborators has focused attention on circadian clock genes as core components of mood regulation Since these contributions, his research program has expanded to include similar work on schizophrenia alcoholism and stress disorders leading to the identification of panels of DNA and RNA markers for disease risk prediction and severity of illness. Niculescu pioneered early on the view that psychiatric disorders are genetically complex, heterogeneous, and overlapping, requiring gene level integration of data followed by pathway analyses. The cumulative combinatorics of common variants and environment model he described for bipolar and other complex disorders based on empirical data, is being increasingly supported by evidence from other groups working on psychiatric and non-psychiatric disorders. More recently, he has proposed a comprehensive unifying model (Mindscape) for conceptualizing how the mind works. His most recent work has focused on understanding and developing genomic and clinical risk predictors for suicide, a preventable tragedy and increasing public health problem.
The associated features of bipolar disorder are clinical phenomena that often accompany bipolar disorder (BD) but are not part of the diagnostic criteria for the disorder. There are several childhood precursors in children who later receive a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. They may show subtle early traits such as mood abnormalities, full major depressive episodes, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. BD is also accompanied by changes in cognition processes and abilities. This includes reduced attentional and executive capabilities and impaired memory. How the individual processes the world also depends on the phase of the disorder, with differential characteristics between the manic, hypomanic and depressive states. Some studies have found a significant association between bipolar disorder and creativity.
Lori Altshuler was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and held the Julia S. Gouw Endowed Chair for Mood Disorders. Altshuler was the Director of the UCLA Mood Disorders Research Program and the UCLA Women's Life Center, each being part of the Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to bipolar disorder:
Adele Juda was an Austrian psychologist and neurologist. She studied the incidence of mental illness in gifted and creative German-speaking people. One of those included in her studies was Mozart, whom she deemed to be 'psychiatrically normal'.
Richard Jed Wyatt was an American psychiatrist and schizophrenia researcher.
Susan Lynn McElroy is Chief Research Officer at Lindner Center of HOPE.
