Has the pharmaceutical industry become the Pied Piper of Hamelin--ridding us of lethal diseases only to turn around and "take" our children?

Would a physician from the 1950s "have identified the frenzy to treat bipolar disorders in infants that developed in twenty-first-century American as a mania?"


In his latest book, Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder (the John Hopkins University Press) David Healy, author of Let Them Eat Prozac, looks at the historic roots of our current "medicalized distress" in which half the population is said to suffer a mental illness at some point in life and babies are diagnosed in utero as bipolar.

Bipolar disorder, once called manic depression, has been embroiled in controversy from its first descriptions in Paris in the 1850s. The pharmaceutical companies and academics behind its current popularity as a "catch-all" disease say it dates back to the ancient Greeks.

But David Healy, professor of psychiatry and the director of the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine at Cardiff University, is not so sure.

References to the frenzied behavior of mental patients found in Hippocrates' Epidemics books 1 and III, Plato's Phaedrus and other early writings almost certainly referred to infective states and not what we mean by bipolar disorder infective disorders with high fevers, hysteria, postpartum manias, catalepsies and melancholies developing into manias, he writes.

Even if the disorder existed before direct-to-consumer television advertising beamed its warning signs into living rooms, it was rare says Healy. Between 1875 and 1924 only 123 patients from North West Wales were admitted to the asylum in North Wales with what we would today call bipolar disorder from a population of a quarter of a million or 12,500,000 person years.

The discovery of lithium in 1817--so plentiful and inexpensive it was added to soft drinks and beer until 1929--and its value in treating bipolar disorder in the late 1950s, changed the course of psychopharmacology says Healy.

Lithium not only introduced the concept of a drug that could act as a mood stabilizer-- offering actual prophylaxis against a mental disease--it introduced the concept of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in which a drug's effectiveness is tested against placebo.