Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture

by Martin, Emily

• ISBN13: 9781400829590
• ISBN10: 1400829593
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781400829590
• Additional ISBN(s): 9780691141060
• Copyright: 2009-03-01
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Manic behavior holds an undeniable fascination in American culture today. It fuels the plots of best-selling novels and the imagery of MTV videos, is acknowledged as the driving force for successful entrepreneurs like Ted Turner, and is celebrated as the source of the creativity of artists like Vincent Van Gogh and movie stars like Robin Williams.Bipolar Expeditionsseeks to understand mania's appeal and how it weighs on the lives of Americans diagnosed with manic depression. Anthropologist Emily Martin guides us into the fascinating and sometimes disturbing worlds of mental-health support groups, mood charts, psychiatric rounds, the pharmaceutical industry, and psychotropic drugs. Charting how these worlds intersect with the wider popular culture, she reveals how people living under the description of bipolar disorder are often denied the status of being fully human, even while contemporary America exhibits a powerful affinity for manic behavior. Mania, Martin shows, has come to be regarded as a distant frontier that invites exploration because it seems to offer fame and profits to pioneers, while depression is imagined as something that should be eliminated altogether with the help of drugs. Bipolar Expeditionsargues that mania and depression have a cultural life outside the confines of diagnosis, that the experiences of people living with bipolar disorder belong fully to the human condition, and that even the most so-called rational everyday practices are intertwined with irrational ones.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. xiii
Preface: Ethnographic Ways and Means	p. xv
Acknowledgments	p. xxi
Introduction: Manic Depression in America	p. 1
Rational and Irrational	p. 5
Brains and Genes	p. 11
The Drug Factor	p. 13
A Short History of Manic Depression	p. 16
Manic Depression in Culture	p. 28
Research Methods	p. 30
Manic Depression as Experience	p. 35
Personhood and Emotion	p. 37
What Are Moods?	p. 43
Mood and Motivation	p. 49
Our Manic Affinity	p. 51
Performing the "Rationality" of "Irrationality"	p. 55
Patients' Rationality: Double Bookkeeping	p. 55
Doctors' Rationality: A Closed Circle	p. 59
The Bipolar Experience: Multiplicity	p. 64
The Bipolar Experience: Interruption	p. 69
Sounding a Second Voice	p. 74
Style and Manic Performances	p. 80
Managing Mania and Depression	p. 86
I Now Pronounce You Manic Depressive	p. 99
I'm in a Hole	p. 101
I Thought I Was Normal When I Was Speedy	p. 102
What Is the Diagnosis?	p. 106
Who Is Manic?	p. 110
What Is Bipolar 2b?	p. 111
I Ain't Gonna Mess with It Backwards	p. 114
Maybe He Is a Normal Variant	p. 117
I'm a Twenty-Year-Old College Student with a 3.75 GPA and I Am Not Crazy	p. 120
Subjection and Rationality	p. 127
Inside the Diagnosis	p. 134
DSM Categories as "Text-Atoms"	p. 135
The Work of Support Groups	p. 143
Performativity, Intention, and Diagnosis	p. 147
Pharmaceutical Personalities	p. 150
Marketing a Psychotropic Drug	p. 150
The Rationality of Consumers	p. 156
Living with Drugs	p. 159
Mania as a Resource	p. 175
Taking the Measure of Moods and Motivations	p. 177
Mood Hygiene	p. 188
Evading Mood Charts	p. 193
From Temperate to Hot	p. 195
Revaluing Mania	p. 197
Sociality and Conformity	p. 198
Manic Depression and Creativity Today	p. 202
Gender and Manic Depression	p. 210
Race and Manic Depression	p. 212
Manic Depression as an "Asset"	p. 216
A Mental State as a "Thing"	p. 220
Understanding Mania and Manic Depression in Their Contexts	p. 229
Manic Markets	p. 234
Links between Individuals and Markets	p. 234
Learning to Be Manic	p. 239
Mania in the Market	p. 243
Emotion in the Market	p. 250
A Few Manic Heroes, Past and Present	p. 253
Manic Affinity	p. 257
A Few Fallen Heroes	p. 259
The Edge	p. 263
Conclusion: The Bipolar Condition	p. 269
Race and Gender Revisited	p. 274
Optimizing Moods	p. 275
The End of Madness?	p. 277
Appendix	p. 281
Notes	p. 287
References	p. 339
Index	p. 363
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