Living Crazy

In writing Bipolar Expeditions, I thought of the book like a house with many windows through which readers could look at moods, mood disorders, and bipolar disorder in particular. Pg 99 of the book opens one of those windows, beginning a chapter that explores how psychiatrists learn to diagnose bipolar disorder in "affective disorder rounds." Rounds is a teaching setting in which a patient who has been admitted to the hospital with mood problems is "presented" to a group of medical students. In that chapter, we see how fuzzy the lines between different mood disorders are and how difficult it is for psychiatrists and medical students to decide among alternative possibilities. We also see how patients contest the doctors’ efforts to extract information from them, which they anticipate will be used to diagnose them in ways they might not

Please join us for the next Psy-ences Seminar

Bipolar Expeditions
Friday, Nov. 16, 2007, 3-5 pm

We will have a discussion of Bipolar Expeditions, Emily Martin’s new book on mania and depression in American culture.

Moderator: Elizabeth Lunbeck, PhD, Department of History, Vanderbilt University

Commentator: Helena Hansen, MD/PhD, Department of Psychiatry, New York University

All are welcome; wine and cheese will be served afterward.
Location: Room 542, 726 Broadway (Center for Religion and Media- NYU- fifth floor), NY, NY

If you want to read something in advance, the first chapter of Bipolar Expeditions is available on the Princeton University web site:
http://press.princeton.edu/

There is an NPR call in radio show with Emily from Focus 580, WILL, on line at
http://www.will.uiuc.edu/am/focus/archives/07/070910.htm

Gary Greenberg, a clinician and freelance journalist, recently published an article in Harper’s (May 2007) on his participation in a clinical trial for depression. The article is full of wonderful insights: