"Bipolar Disorder can be a great teacher. It's a challenge, but it can set you up to be able to do almost anything else in your life."

-Carrie Fisher-



The above quote is taken from the words of mental health advocate and Hollywood icon, the late Carrie Fisher, or, as she’s more popularly known, Princess Leia from the movie Star Wars. Fisher battled with mental health issues—including Bipolar Disorder—most of her life, and she wasn’t afraid to speak openly about it. She never missed an opportunity to explain to people that Bipolar Disorder is not a curse, but rather it’s a gift; she held true to the ideal that, much like a bodybuilder is able to increase their weights over time, those of us who deal with Bipolar Disorder are often stronger than the average person simply because they carry the weight of a constant battle throughout their entire lives.

When approaching this particular mental health issue, it’s important to consider its origins. The first recorded case of Bipolar Disorder was in Greece during the first century AD by a physician and philosopher named Aretaeus of Cappadocia. He describes patients who “laugh, play, [and] dance night and day, and sometimes go openly to the market crowned, as if victors in some contest of skill, only to be torpid, dull, and sorrowful at other times.” Aretaeus attributed both patterns of behavior to the same disorder. However, despite that, and subsequent cases, it didn’t gain credence until the 17th century; prior to that mania and depression were considered two separate disorders. In the 1800s, a man named Theophilus Bonet published a text entitled Sepuchretum, which detailed his experiences performing roughly 3,000 autopsies. In the text, he linked the two disorders in a condition called “Manico-melancollicus, manico from the Greek word for “spirit, force, or passion,” and melancollicus from the Greek words melas, which means “black” and chole, meaning “bile,” as the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates theorized that melancholy—the original term for depression—came from an excess of bile. Further study into the disorder didn’t become part of mainstream medical conversation until the early 1900s, when a German psychiatrist named Emil Kraepelin observed untreated patients and discovered that the extremes were accompanied by relatively symptom-free intervals. Up until this point the disorder was considered in the same scope as Schizophrenia, but Kraepelin’s studies revealed that it was actually a separate disorder, and hence he coined the term “Manic-Depression.”