Bipolar Today

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Today’s issue of the Daily Monitor wrote an article today about the CNN documentary called “Locked Up and Forgotten”. The article cited the documentary’s discussion of how poor treatment is of mental illness and learning disabilities is in Uganda. The article focused on bipolar disorder, giving a description of the condition and describing the current problems with treatment (for example, Uganda has a population of 30 million people and only 25 psychiatrists). More information about the documentary itself, which doesn’t focus on bipolar disorder per se, can be found on the CNN website here.

Commentary

The article is actually newsworthy in its own right. At first, the article seems to be oddly written. It starts with a brief description of the documentary and then with a long description of what bipolar disorder is. It then ends. The goal of the author, however, is to teach the readers about bipolar disorder, in order to correct some of the misunderstandings about bipolar disorder (and other mental illnesses) identified in the documentary. The photograph that accompanies the article is one of Catherine Zeta-Jones, who recently went public with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and seems to be an effort by the author to show how common and normal bipolar disorder is.

In other words, this isn’t so much an article reporting on the documentary (the documentary didn’t focus on bipolar disorder and was primarily about Kenya, not Uganda), but an article using the documentary as a hook to discuss bipolar disorder itself, teach people about the disorder, and normalize it. It is, in this way, fighting to counter the very problems identified in the documentary. Since the Daily Monitor reaches a readership of one million people, it is likely to do just this, providing useful information about bipolar disorder to those who might not otherwise know.

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