Historical+Context+of+Bipolar

The concept of bipolar disorder has had a long journey in its development. In Ancient Greece the words melancholia and mania were used to respectively describe states of depression and atypical moods. Around 400 B.C. Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, developed a humoral theory. Hippocrates conceived that a person's pathological disposition was directly related to his or her levels of bodily fluids. Accordingly, mania was the outcome of having an excess of yellow bile; melancholia was also the outcome of having excess of bile, but in this case of black bile. In fact, melancholia’s literal meaning is “black bile”.
 * A Brief History... **

The modern concept of bipolar disorder began to take shape around the nineteenth century in Europe. In 1885, both Jean-Pierre Falret and Jules Baillarger independently wrote two papers that described the symptoms of an illness that is strikingly similar to bipolar disorder. Baillarger called the illness // “folie à double form”  //, meaning dual-form insanity Falret called it // “folie circulaire” // ; meaning circular insanity. Falret even noted in his research that there seemed to be a genetic factor in the illness, since there were similar symptoms found within families. The genetic correlation in bipolar disorder is widely accepted today.



The term manic-depressive was established in 1913 by the German psychiatrist Emil Krapelin. Krapelin noticed that many of his patients who had experienced an acute manic or depressive state would return back to a normal state free from any earlier symptoms. He would categorize this as manic-depressive psychosis. He also developed an early classification of schizophrenia, which he called dementia praecox. It is interesting to note that Emil Krapelin is sometimes referred to as the father of modern psychiatry and psychopharmacology.

The term “manic-depressive reaction” was what appeared in the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1952. Then in 1957 Karl Leonhand developed further classification of ‘manic-depressive illness’, which led to the introduction of the term “bipolar”. However, it wasn’t until the 1980s when a push for a less stigmatizing classificat ion led to the formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder.