What Is Bipolar Disorder?

Take our Bipolar Disorder Test

Find a therapist to treat bipolar disorder

The legal standard for psychiatric intervention is danger, not suffering—care comes only after harm is done.

Individualization, not just biological reductionism, is psychiatry's failure: the person cut from history.

By 2023, most remaining state psychiatric beds were filled by people committed through the courts.

The care that finally helped required confinement—I had to become dangerous to reach the only open door.

Between 2016 and 2024, I moved through the American healthcare system as a man it could not hold. I had bipolar I disorder, though no one told me so until nearly the end. What the system saw instead was a series of discrete problems, each treated in isolation by a clinician who never spoke to the last.

There were years of misdiagnosis and the polypharmacy that follows: antidepressants that quietly fed the mania they were meant to relieve.

And there was the drinking. I drank to mute a pain I had no name for, and when it landed me in emergency rooms over many years, the clinicians there saw alcohol and treated alcohol. They were not wrong that I was drinking too much. They were wrong about what it meant. No one asked what the drinking was for, or connected it to the earlier episodes of mood disturbance. Each visit closed its own small file and sent me back out.

The physician and anthropologist Khameer Kidia has a name for this habit of mind. The psy disciplines, he argues, are individualizing: they locate distress inside the person rather than in the conditions and history that produce it. And they suffer a historical blindness, an inability to see that what has happened to a person over........

© Psychology Today