Bipolar Expeditions (50 page)

2. Miklowitz,
The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide.

3. Rose,
Inventing Our Selves,
103.

4. Miller and Goode,
Man and His Body.

5. This is similar to Bruno Latour's “action at a distance”
(Science in Action).
On accounting schemes, see Miller, “Accounting and Objectivity”; T. Porter,
Trust in Numbers.

6. The context of this phrase is: “Everything becomes saleable and buyable. The circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as a gold-crystal. Not even are the bones of saints, and still less are more delicate res sacrosanctae, extra commercium hominum able to withstand this alchemy”
(Capital,
132).

7. Otniel Dror has done important historical work on the ways emotions became numerically measured by technological devices in the late nineteenth century. When emotion was “numerized,” it became knowable scientifically and became positioned inside the language of reason. See Dror, “Counting the Affects.”

8. In a wide-ranging review of the history and social effects of the concept of commensuration, Wendy Nelson Espeland and Mitchell L. Stevens trace the first formulation of how commensurability was paired with control, stability, and rationality, while incommensurability was paired with chaos, anxiety, and threat, to Plato's ideas from the fifth and early fourth centuries
BC.
See Espeland and Stevens, “Commensuration as a Social Process.” They draw on Martha Nussbaum's argument that Plato needed to make ethical values commensurate so that they could be ranked. Once people could rank their values, they could make rational choices among them and avoid following the pull of irrational passions. Aristotle, in contrast, questioned the goal of rendering value general and homogenous and preferred to retain the value of things and people for their own sakes. Nussbaum, “Plato on Commensurability and Desire.”

9. Kraepelin,
Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia,
140.

10. Ibid., 149.

11. Hoff, “Kraepelin: Clinical Sections, I,” 269.

12. Engstrom, “Kraepelin: Social Section,” 294.

13. Berrios and Hauser, “Clinical Sections,” 281.

14. Kraepelin,
One Hundred Years of Psychiatry,
151.

15. Kraepelin,
Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia,
151.

16. Kraepelin,
Clinical Psychiatry,
414.

17. Ibid.

18. At one time, the NIMH Web site solicited participation in ongoing NIMH studies of mood disorders.

19. The Mood Tree is not exclusively for children and is not marketed exclusively to parents, but rather to all ages from six years old and up, including adolescents and adults. The different versions have somewhat different terms on the apples.

20. McDonald,
The Judy Moody Mood Journal.

21. Mohammed, “A Mood Chart System.” I am focusing primarily on mood charts that people come upon or seek out on their own. There is another form of mood charting, in use for nearly a decade, used in largescale studies of the efficacy of medications for mood disorders. In these studies, based on a retrospective or prospective “Life-Chart Method,” patients are recruited and enrolled for the specific purpose of having their affective states charted, or learning how to chart them themselves. See Denicoff et al., “Validation of the Prospective NIMH-Life-Chart Method”; bipolar news, “What Is Life Charting?”

22. Mondimore,
Bipolar Disorder,
222.

23. Sartorius, “Depressive Disorders,” 1.

24. The film was produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Company. A copy is held in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine.

25. Healy,
The Antidepressant Era,
76.

26. Tanouye, “Mental Illness: A Rising Workplace Cost.”

27. Stewart et al., “Cost of Lost Productive Work Time among U.S. Workers with Depression.”

28. The sociologist Alain Ehrenberg traces the historical entailments between depression as an emerging psychiatric category and French concepts of action and inaction. See Ehrenberg,
La fatigue d'être soi.

29. “Depressed and on Welfare.”

30. The actual path walked by patients who take SSRIs, which might begin with relief, progress to tolerance, and end with new modes of actualizing the self, is far more complex than advertisements convey. For an analysis of first-person accounts of this path, see Metzl,
Prozac on the Couch,
174–94.

31. Kramer, “There's Nothing Deep about Depression.”

32. Lewis and the Illinois Leader,
Illinois Launches Compulsory Mental Health Screening for Children and Pregnant Women;
Medical Condition News, “Texas Medication Algorithm Project Guidelines Produce Improvements in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder.” For information on other whistle blowers who have filed charges that the pharmaceutical industry used inappropriate means to promote psychotropic drugs, see the Web site of the Alliance for Human Research Protection at
http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/07.php
.

33. Sher,
Live the Life You Love,
54.

34. This is not entirely new. In
White Collar
(1951), C. Wright Mills described how in twentieth-century salesmanship, traits found in creative salesmen were “expropriated”: codified and displayed in a controlled way. Quoted in Ewen,
All Consuming Images.

35. Warren Sussman showed that late nineteenth-century advice books described the self as based on character, moral integrity that could be improved through hard work, moral behavior, and frugality. After the turn of the twentieth century, advice books focused on personality, a quality that one shaped by making oneself attractive to others. Francesca Bordogna analyzes William James's thesis about the temperament and its link to the physiological constitution of the individual in “The Psychology and Physiology of Temperament.”

36. Friedman, “What's the Lure of the Edge?” F7.

37. MacLennan, “The Global CNS Therapeutics Markets.”

38. I am echoing Pierre Bourdieu's phraseology in
Distinction
. Hedescribes how rationalization in the school system in France replaces “practical schemes of classification” with “explicit, standardized taxonomies.” These typologies are deliberately taught and therefore fixed in memory as knowledge that can be “reproduced in virtually identical form by all the agents subjected to its action” (67).

39. This point is made powerfully by Nikolas Rose in a number of important publications. See, for example, Rose, “Becoming Neurochemical Selves,” and
Governing the Soul.

40. Historically, the collection of statistics has played a key role in enabling new regimes of control to arise. For the role of statistics in colonial regimes, see Anderson,
Imagined Communities.
On the “looping effects” of categories of human kinds, see Hacking, “Making up People.”

41. Miller, “Accounting and Objectivity,” 79.

42. Mohammed, “A Mood Chart System.”

43. In an analogous process, when a specific form of labor is transformed through abstraction from something with use value into something with exchange value, it also becomes social. Marx explained how the specific labor of tailoring a coat could become equivalent to the very different specific labor of weaving linen. First, the concrete labor of tailoring becomes “directly identified with undifferentiated human labour,” which is measured by labor time. This makes tailoring “identical with any other sort of labour” including the labor of weaving linen. Although tailoring, like all labor that produces commodities, is “the labour of private individuals … yet, at the same time, it ranks as labour directly social in its character…. The labour of private individuals takes the form of its opposite, labour directly social in its form”
(Capital,
1014).

44. “Moral Thermometer.”

45. Another version of the thermometer, published as the frontispiece of one of Rush's books, was divided into an upper section titled “Temperance” and a lower one called “Intemperance.” Drinking only water and milk would lead to “health, wealth, serenity of mind, reputation, long life and happiness.” Drinking anything more potent than strong punch would lead to vices (idleness, quarreling, anarchy), diseases (gout, melancholy, madness), and punishments (debt, hunger, workhouse, jail). Rush,
An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind.

46. “Moral Thermometer,” 5–6.

C
HAPTER
8

1. Thanks to David Harvey for telling me about Keynes's animal spirits.

2. For one example, see Berresem, “Emotions Flattened and Scattered.” Others have laid postmodernity's pervasive emotional emptiness at the feet of the social forces of capitalism, which, requiring continuous growth under intense competition and ruthless entrepreneurialism for survival, have made catastrophic job loss a normal experience for increasing numbers of people. Harvey,
The Condition of Postmodernity.

3. According to Henry Ellenberger's history of psychoanalysis, the metaphor of colonizing the mind has been used before for new psychiatric discoveries. In France, Mesmer (1734–1815) developed an early form of dynamic psychotherapy to replace exorcism. Because his method explored the mind itself rather than exorcising foreign spirits from it, he was compared to Columbus
(Discovery of the Unconscious,
57). Charcot, the French doctor who displayed and treated hysteria at Salpetriere in the 1880s, used hypnotism to show the symptoms were not produced by lesions of the nervous system. He was called the “Napoleon of neuroses” (95). In her study of Madagascar, Lesley Sharp has used the notion of the colonized mind. See
The Sacrificed Generation.

4. Sass,
Madness and Modernism,
80.

5. Kretschmer,
Physique and Character,
129–30.

6. Sass,
Madness and Modernism,
4–982.

7. Lunbeck,
The Psychiatric Persuasion,
146.

8. Kraus, “How Can the Phenomenological-Anthropological Approach Contribute to Diagnosis and Classification in Psychiatry?” 208.

9. Lunbeck,
The Psychiatric Persuasion,
146.

10. Southard and Jarrett,
The Kingdom of Evils,
477. Making a virtue of these traits for psychological studies, the German psychologist Sophus Thalbitzer wrote in 1926 that he regarded manic-depressive patients as “the best material for the study of normal processes of feeling.” He argued that in manic depression, normal moods and emotions are strongly defined and magnified: “We see them as if under the microscope with each characteristic feature standing out in bold relief; we can observe the mood-psychosis as a natural mood or feeling raises, as it were to a higher power”
(Emotion and Insanity,
43). Ernst Kretschmer reiterated Southard's affection for the manicdepressive type: “The individuals in the region of manic-depressive madness are prevailingly sociable, good-natured men, people with whom one can get on well, who understand a joke, and who take life as it comes. They give themselves naturally and openly, and one soon makes friends with them; they have often something soft and warm in their temperaments”
(Physique and Character,
124).

11. Kraus, “Identity and Psychosis of the Manic-Depressive,” 203. In this and the following article, Kraus provides a wealth of references to earlier work in psychology and psychoanalysis on the conformist attitudes of manic-depressive patients (206–7). See Kraus, “Role Performance, Identity Structure and Psychosis in Melancholic and Manic-Depressive Patients.” A 1979 study of multigenerational bipolar illness in families also stressed the unrealistic standards of conformity subscribed to in the families studied. See Davenport, “Manic-Depressive Illness,” 25.

12. Kraus, “Identity and Psychosis of the Manic-Depressive,” 205–6.

13. In his memoir, Andrew Solomon describes the social withdrawal depression brings: “[M]ajor depression has a number of defining factors—mostly having to do with withdrawal, though agitated or atypical depression may have an intense negativity rather than a flattened passivity—and is usually fairly easy to recognize; it deranges sleep, appetites, and energy. It tends to increase sensitivity to rejection, and it may be accompanied by a loss of self-confidence and self-regard” (The
Noonday Demon,
48).

14. Kretschmer describes further how people react to the mania of a manic depressive: “It is well known that even manics in a state of excitement have usually something childishly good-natured, trustful, and tractable about them, they are far more up to mischief then harsh acts of violence, they seldom make a serious attempt to do anyone any harm; they just flare up all of a sudden but they are soon quiet again; one can seldom take anything they do in bad part. And the pure typical circular depressives have some soft quality in their moodiness”
(Physique and Character,
129). The topic is beyond my scope, but it would be instructive to consider the narcissistic elements in mania. Inflated self-esteem is listed as one of the defining terms of mania in the DSM, indicating that there is a family resemblance between mania and narcissism. Research suggests there might well be comorbidity between manic depression and narcissistic personality disorder, as in Crockford and el-Guebaly, “Psychiatric Comorbidity in Pathological Gambling.” Considered not just as a bundle of traits but as a loosely integrated style, however, narcissism conveys more of a sense of social isolation and inner emptiness than mania: it might well elicit a lower “empathic index” than mania. For a perceptive account of narcissism as a style, see Johnson,
Humanizing the Narcissistic Style.
For an important study of the history of narcissism as a concept in psychiatry and a cultural preoccupation in the United States, see Lunbeck,
The Americanization of Narcissism.