Bipolar Today

Lisa M. Hermsen has written a book that traces the history of the word “mania” from its roots in ancient Greece, through the early modern period, and into the twentieth century. The book is called Manic Minds: Mania’s Mad History and Its Neuro-Future, and it seeks to understand how the current diagnostic category of mania is related to its roots linguistically. “Mania,” Hermsen argues, started off as a Greek word that means something like “raging,” then becomes synonymous with madness as a whole in the early modern period before finally being specified as a type of episode in bipolar disorder. She argues that we cannot understand contemporary categories in bipolar disorder unless we understand this history, and she is especially interested in the ways that current discussion has shifted to discussing mania from within the experience rather than from outside. The book is published by Rutgers University Press.

Commentary

This book addresses one of the questions that has always puzzled me: why did we inherit the word that used to define mental illness as a whole? By the time of Plato (see the Phaedrus) and in the early modern period, “mania” was synonymous with the (largely defunct) term “madness.” If anything, the modern concept of psychosis inherited the conceptual space taken up by the older idea of “madness,” but we somehow took the word. So, what happened? By tracing the meaning of the word through time, Hermsen traces in part the history of bipolar disorder from the perspective of how bipolar disorder is perceived, and how bipolar disorder was speciated from other forms of mental illness.

Related posts: