Bipolar Expeditions (44 page)

T
ABLE
2
Drug Names, Types, and Uses

T
ABLE
3
Twelve-Month Prevalence* of Mood Disorders (International), 2001–2003 WHO Survey

Source.
NIMH,
The Numbers Count.

* The proportion of individuals who manifest the disorder over one year.

T
ABLE
4
Twelve-Month Prevalence of Mood Disorders and Schizophrenia (U.S.), 2001 NIMH Study

Source.
NIMH,
The Numbers Count.

T
ABLE
5
Comparison of Number of Uses of the Terms “Bipolar Disorder” and “Manic Depression,” 1960–2002

Source:
ProQuest All Newspapers Index. The search was done on March 17, 2003.

T
ABLE
6
References to the Phrase “Survival of the Fittest,” Averages for Five-Year Intervals

Source
: ProQuest, Basic Search, Multiple Databases, for the years 1980–2004. The search was done on February 24, 2005.

Notes

 

 

P
REFACE

1. About twenty years ago, I shifted the focus of my research from ethnographic studies of Chinese villages in Taiwan to ethnographic studies on the popular culture of medicine and biology in the United States. In the ensuing years I wrote about women's experiences of reproduction, as well as popular and scientific understandings of HIV and AIDS. Martin,
Flexible Bodies;
Martin,
The Woman in the Body.

2. James Baldwin found the gargoyles of Chartres “obscene, inescapable … seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced”
(Notes of a Native Son,
174).

3. Although delusions like this are often associated with the diagnosis of schizophrenia, they are also cited in psychiatric definitions of manic depression in standard reference works like the American Psychiatric Association's
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM). In this book, I will gradually open to scrutiny standard medical terms and definitions such as those that appear in the DSM.

4. Weismantel,
Cholas and Pishtacos, 8.

5. Baldwin,
Notes of a Native Son,
174, 61.

6. Ibid., 155, 74–75.

7. A burning issue among these students was that they were forced to take a year's leave upon diagnosis. They would be readmitted if they could show they had been productive during the year away, a condition that some found rather contradictory. Years later the issue would be taken up in the media around concern about litigation over student suicides. See Arenson, “Worried Colleges Step up Efforts over Suicide.”

I
NTRODUCTION

1. McCoy, “Cramer's Real-Time ‘Real Money' Shows Land in Local Radio.”

2. Schonfeld, “Second Act for Manic CEO.”

3. Brink, “CEO Sufferings Trickle Down.”

4. Boodman, “Going to Extremes.”

5. There are widely accessible books describing the basic psychological elements that make emotions contagious. See Goleman,
Emotional Intelligence;
Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson,
Emotional Contagion;
Kotter,
Leading Change.
There are also articles in magazines for parents that detail how to prevent the worst moods from spreading between parents and children. See, e.g., Fintushel, “Are Bad
Moods
Catching?”

6. Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee, “Primal Leadership,” 44.

7. See for example DeWitt and Liu, “The Customer Orientation-Loyalty Model”; Howard and Gengler, “Emotional Contagion Effects on Product Attitudes”; Totterdell,
What Is Emotion Management?

8. The term “affinity” is from Max Weber's phrase, “elective affinity,” used, for example, in his introduction to
Sociology of Religion.
Weber was interested in describing the affinities between different social spheres, such as those between Puritan ethics and capitalist business practices in seventeenth-century England. Weber's emphasis was on the ways affinities reinforced each other and therefore could enhance the development of whole systems such as capitalism. For an imaginative exploration of the concept, see Boon,
Affinities and Extremes.

9. “Men of the Year.”

10. “Americans Should Be Glad.”

11. Ibid. David Schneider notes that Americans define humans on the basis of their capacity to reason, as opposed to animals' unreason. Schneider,
American Kinship,
108.

12. Clifford Geertz relates the disquiet of the Balinese cockfight to its ability to “force together … diverse realities” that are “normally wellobscured from view” (“Deep Play,” 444).

13. Being diagnosed or treated for bipolar disorder threatens admission to the practice of law in some states. The Florida Board of Bar Examiners, for example, requires special explanation if the candidate to the bar has been charged with a criminal offense, demonstrated violent behavior, been addicted to drugs, or “been treated or received a diagnosis during the last 5 years for schizophrenia or other psychotic disorder; bipolar or major depressive mood disorder; drug or alcohol abuse; impulse control disorder, including kleptomania, pyromania, explosive disorder, pathological or compulsive gambling; or paraphilia such as pedophilia, exhibitionism or voyeurism.” Hunter, “Letter Requesting Information.”

14. Within the vast philosophical literature on this topic, I have benefited in particular from the work of Steven Lukes. See Hollis and Lukes,
Rationality and Relativism;
Lukes,
Liberals and Cannibals.

15. Berrios,
History of Mental Symptoms,
291. For Plato and Aristotle, in Berrios's words, “The absence or obliteration of reason led to error and evil with the ‘passions' being the main source of perturbation and chaos” (291). “In Greek culture, affective excitement culminating in irrationality was considered as a common mechanism of insanity” (292).

16. Dodds,
The Greeks and the Irrational,
185.

17. Butterfield, “This Way Madness Lies,” 14.

18. This is a characteristic of Florida law. Based on what is known as the M'Naughten rule, a defendant must be shown to have no understanding of the difference between right and wrong in order to use the insanity defense. As of 1998, twenty-two states used a version of the M'Naughten rule, and twenty-six used a version of the American Law Institute model insanity defense statute, which allowed a softening of the M'Naughten rule.

19. Butterfield, “This Way Madness Lies,” 14.

20. In the eighteenth century, by John Locke's definition, the mad were
capable
of rational thought, but they started from the wrong assumptions. According to Locke, “[M]admen do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning … but having joined some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles”
(An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
1:209–10). Alice Faye Redd's case shows us how far we have diverged from Locke's view. Both the judge and the press agreed that her mental illness (her madness) entailed a
diminished capacity
for rational thought. In her study of the history of colonization in Hawaii, Sally Merry clarifies the role of the law in conferring the status of a rational person: “Law allocates rationality and adulthood when it designates who can vote for whom, who can run for political office, and who can be a citizen. Those given identity within the law as citizens and deemed capable of contractual relationships were defined as rational and civilized; others were labeled irrational, animalistic and dangerous” (“Law and Identity in an American Colony,” 149).

21. Kraepelin,
Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia.

22. Martha Nussbaum's discussion of the role of emotions in the law, connected to Western traditions derived from Aristotle, illuminates how the law is better equipped to handle more ordinary emotional states
(Hiding from Humanity,
23ff.).

23. Conrad,
Heart of Darkness.

24. Luhrmann,
Of Two Minds,
270.

25. Styron,
Darkness Visible.

26. These dichotomies have been described as characteristic of people of the modern era, who, bolstered by the power of Western science and capitalist expansion, operated by a “constitution” that abjured hybrids that fell in between. To moderns, “hybrids present the horror that must be avoided at all costs by a ceaseless, even maniacal purification.” Latour,
We Have Never Been Modern,
112.

27. Estimates of the prevalence of bipolar disorder are complicated because studies use different units of measurement and different criteria for what counts as bipolar disorder. The common estimate that in the United States 1 percent of the population has bipolar disorder is being challenged by new studies that argue for a higher figure, at least 5 percent. See Akiskal et al., “Re-Evaluating the Prevalence of and Diagnostic Composition within the Broad Clinical Spectrum of Bipolar Disorders.”
Table 3
(see appendix) shows some published (international) comparative statistics using a twelve-month prevalence—the proportion of individuals who manifest the condition over one year.
Table 4
(see appendix) shows statistics for twelve-month prevalence in the United States.