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

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

"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