The ancient Greeks knew of the disorder, French psychiatrists did a lot of research in the early 1800s. medical papers were published in 1850 describing and cataloging the symptoms - the French actually did a lot of research into mental illnesses during the latter part of the 19th century at a time when we British were paying a halfpenny to go and laugh at the lunatics in the asylum every sunday as a bit of a change from visiting the zoo.

You may have heard of the phrase "manic depressive", same thing.

Bipolar includes both mania and depression, unipolar has the depression element only - phrases used in America since the 1950s

Satisfied now ?

The treatment of mental health in general & recognition by others that people are afflicted by these imbalances is extremely poor in the UK IMO.

I have had episodes of biPolar all my adult life (& looking back my childhood to a degree), it's quite scary at times how I behave & the subsequent affect on those around me including those that I hold most dear...
It's impossible to explain to someone why you feel the way you do & virtually as impossible from stopping doing/saying/feeling the things you do..
Stuff that can be so extreme it is frightening/beyond reason to others & yet when you are in the pit of despair nothing can pull you out except the continued support/love from those around you until it lessens.
God bless to all those affected by this..

It was discovered in 1926 when Norwegian eplorer Roald Admussen determined that the closer he got to the North Pole, the more likely the Innuit were to swing both ways

Why is this relevent?

None of his posts are relevant.

What amazes me is that he's either trolling and purposely trying to upset people effected by Bi Polar or he's uneducated on the subject.

Either way he's a loving idiot.

So what date do you put on diseases/conditions being discovered/understood/diagnosed and their being 'legitimate' in your view?

Aids is a fairly recent discovery in the scheme of things.....I suppose that isnt real either?

That is an excellent example. And also one that, in all probability, had been around for rather longer than it's easy to imagine given that it was only the 1980s when it was identified and named.

In the interests of being as balanced as possible, there are serious questions over some 'conditions', which may have had to be invented by the pharmaceutical industry for various reasons. A specific case, and very recent, is that of a low female sex drive. Big pharm realised it had the research to make a drug for this – so it then had to create a need. The likes of Dr Malcolm Kendrick also question when cholesterol became a disease and why, on a very similar basic.

But there's literature out there about exactly those issues. I not personally ever seen anything that disputes the very real existence of bi-polar.

Having said that, it is quite fashionable (?) to doubt some conditions (struggling to find the correct word here), particularly in terms of those that affect children and their behaviour – ADDT and similar ones. And it's only really relatively recently that people accepted that dyslexia was a genuine condition and not a put on or an excuse.

So to be fair to Toast, I don't think he's alone in perhaps assuming that something is not genuine, simply because diagnosis is new. But so much understanding, diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues is new and ongoing.

Excellent post. I have no doubt that there are many conditions which could effectively be rolled into one, or that there are conditions which are banded around to explain things such as uruly behaviour in children. I fully understand peoples scepticism of bi polar, and to be honest, until I had experienced my partners episodes I would count myself among them. One thing I would never do though, is be an arrogant, ignorant ar$e wipe about it. I could quite esily say that tourettes is a made up afflication by people who like to swear a lot, but having seen the detrimental impact it has on peoples lives, I wouldnt dare.

Toast (if not trolling) is probably fairly typical of a dumbed-down, naive and susceptible swathe of the population.

These are instant soundbite people. Whether able to do so or not, they have no interest whatsoever in acquiring knowledge or study. An informed position is as alien to them as Venus, and about as attractive.

Instead, they think they know everything, and that nobody can tell them anything, and the big change is that the various social media platforms have suddenly given even the most blithering idiot a "voice", which many feel almost obsessively compelled to use on pretty much any topic. They are irrationally but unbendingly convinced that their knee-jerk views, probably harvested from a combination of scumbag redtops, neo-fascists and populist propaganda blindly swallowed from vested interests, are both blindingly obvious, and shared (or should be) by any right-thinking person.

Instead they invariably advertise their ignorance, intolerance and insouciance. It is a nasty trait, but the sick, old, ill, disabled and anyone potentially seen as some kind of "burden" on "society" have throughout history often been made targets of mockery, abuse and worse, and still are.

In this country we have spent many years and much blood in trying to achieve a society which is better than that, but sadly the dark forces are never far away, and in the form of our present "government", it is worryingly easy to see hard-won progress suddenly being targeted savagely and without a conscience, for obscene political ends.

Why bother to spend time to do a little bit of your own research, or to consider and actually begin to understand a given topic? Surely, hearing or reading belligerent soundbites to which you're superficially attracted is enough? Reasoned discussion? Why, when you can just text "MORON" to some voteline number (texts cost £1 plus your normal network charge) and move on to castigate the next category of wasters?