Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease)

by David Healy

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Author: David Healy

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Hardcover:
ISBN 10: 9780801888229
ISBN 13: 978-0801888229

This provocative history of bipolar disorder illuminates how perceptions of illness, if not the illnesses themselves, are mutable over time.

Beginning with the origins of the concept of mania?and the term maniac?in ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, renowned psychiatrist David Healy examines how concepts of mental afflictions evolved as scientific breakthroughs established connections between brain function and mental illness. Healy recounts the changing definitions of mania through the centuries, explores the effects of new terminology and growing public awareness of the disease on culture and society, and examines the rise of psychotropic treatments and pharmacological marketing over the past four decades. Along the way, Healy clears much of the confusion surrounding bipolar disorder even as he raises crucial questions about how, why, and by whom the disease is diagnosed.

Drawing heavily on primary sources and supplemented with interviews and insight gained over Healy's long career, this lucid and engaging overview of mania sheds new light on one of humankind's most vexing ailments.

Review

"If David Healy's intent is to present a cohesive, thorough, integrated and provocative account of the history of the concept of mania and the evolution of what is currently called bipolar disorder, he is tremendously successful."

(PsycCRITIQUES)

"Healy reminds us that we need to ask ourselves what it means to be ill and what it means to be well."

(Garan Holcombe California Literary Review)

"A learned and polemical volume in the series Biographies of Disease published by the Johns Hopkins University Press... Healy is an intellectual bomb-thrower, a most erudite and clever doctor with an anarchic streak that he cannot quite reconcile with disinterested historical inquiry. He is interesting precisely for the subtle detonations that he sets off in the reader’s mind, rattling the received ideas too comfortably ensconced there."

(Algis Valiunas New Atlantis)

"A powerful political tract. As social history it provides the most detailed available account of the interactions of psychiatry and the world of pharmaceutical manufacturing."

(Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease)

"Provides a probing and challenging commentary on the state of contemporary psychiatry."

(Allan Beveridge British Journal of Psychiatry)

"David Healy is indeed an enfant terrible―and a very brave man. I doubt he is on Eli Lilly’s or Pfizer’s Christmas card list."

(Times Literary Supplement)

"Mania is a work that deserves a wide readership."

(Gerald N. Grob, Ph.D. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences)

"Well-written and compelling... I encourage you to read this exceptional book."

(Tom Olson, PhD Nursing History Review)

"The book is a scholarly one [and] Healy's wide knowledge of the facts of the history is impressive."

(Paul Skerritt Health and History)

"[Healy's] work has enriched our historiographic discourse enormously and social historians of medicine can only greet that as good news."

(Eric J. Engstrom Social History of Medicine)

From the Back Cover

In this provocative history, David Healy explores how perceptions of illness, if not illnesses themselves, are mutable over time.

Drawing heavily on primary sources and supplemented with interviews and insight gained over Healy's long career, this lucid and engaging narrative of bipolar disorder sheds new light on one of humankind's most vexing ailments.

"David Healy is indeed an enfant terrible―and a very brave man. I doubt he is on Eli Lilly's or Pfizer's Christmas card list."―Times Literary Supplement

"How did we come to apply such a serious diagnosis to vaguely depressed or irritable adults, to unruly children, and to nursing home residents? Is it simply that psychiatric science has progressed and now allows us to detect more easily an illness that had previously been ignored or misunderstood? Healy has another, more cynical explanation: the never-ending expansion of the category of bipolar disorder benefits large pharmaceutical companies eager to sell medications marketed with the disorder in mind."―London Review of Books

"A powerful political tract. As social history it provides the most detailed available account of the interactions of psychiatry and the world of pharmaceutical manufacturing."―Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

"If David Healy's intent is to present a cohesive, thorough, integrated, and provocative account of the history of the concept of mania and the evolution of what is currently called bipolar disorder, he is tremendously successful."―PsycCRITIQUES

About the Author

David Healy is a professor of psychiatry and the director of the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine at Cardiff University. He is the author of several books on the history of psychopharmaceuticals, including Let Them Eat Prozac, The Antidepressant Era, and The Creation of Psychopharmacology.

"That conceptual entity―and thus lived reality―we call bipolar disease today is peculiarly a product of our world. It is a world in which reductionist notions of disease have come to dominate our way of thinking about sickness. It is a world of bureaucratic categories and psychopharmaceutical practice. It is a world created in part by the laboratory’s accomplishments, but it is also a social world shaped in part by mass media and advertising, by corporate strategies and government policies. And, as is illustrated by highly visible contemporary debates over the problematic increase of bipolar diagnoses in children, it is shaped as well by the public contestation of such clinical judgments―decisions that are in theory individual, private, and objective.

"It is in this multidimensional sense that the subject of David Healy’s biography exists outside the bodies and emotions of any particular man, woman, or child. But these aggregated social, cultural, and institutional realities can and do intrude into very real bodies and minds. Healy never lets us forget the men, women, and children who feel emotional pain and incapacity no matter how much such disquieting experience is modified by drugs and ideology, by business plans and bureaucratic rationalities, by professional strategies and rewards. His subject is both timeless and timely, situated in social and cultural space, yet anchored implacably in the idiosyncratic circumstantiality of particular lives."―Charles E. Rosenberg, from the Foreword

Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease)

Review

From the Back Cover

About the Author

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Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease)