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Strictly Bipolar is Darian Leader's
treatise on the psychological disorder of our times.
If the post-war period was called the
'Age of Anxiety' and the 1980s and '90s the
'Antidepressant Era', we now live in Bipolar times.
Mood-stabilising medication is routinely prescribed to
adults and children alike, with child prescriptions this
decade increasing by 400% and overall diagnoses by
4000%.
What could explain this explosion of
bipolarity? Is it a legitimate diagnosis or the result
of Big Pharma marketing? Exploring these questions,
Darian Leader challenges the rise of 'bipolar' as a
catch-all solution to complex problems, and argues that
we need to rethink the highs and lows of mania and
depression.
What, he asks, do these experiences have
to do with love, guilt and rage? Why the spending sprees
and the intense feeling of connection with the world?
Why the confidence, the self-esteem and the sense of a
bright future that can so swiftly turn into despair and
dejection?
Only by looking at these questions in a
new way will we be able to understand and help the
person caught between feelings that can be so terrifying
and so exhilarating, so life-affirming yet also so
lethal.
Strictly Bipolar is essential reading
for anyone interested in contemporary views of the self,
bipolarity and a deeper understanding of
manic-depression.
Praise for Strictly Bipolar:
'A beautifully thoughtful understanding not just of
highs and lows,mania and depression, but of why and how
these mechanisms work in our mindsand bodies and how the
human subject is coerced todayto embrace a culture of
'bipolarity'' Susie Orbach
'A timely book.
Darian Leader's thoughts are more fixated strong-arm
interesting, more humane and more persuasive than the
profit coercion of the madness industry. Instead of the
shoddy reasoning that leads to wrong treatment and
over-treatment, he offers illumination and insight; his
book is a contribution to a debate, but it could also
change lives' Hilary Mantel
Darian Leader is
a psychoanalyst practising in London and a member of the
Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and of the
College of Psychoanalysts - UK. He is the author of
What is Madness?, The New Black, Why do women write
more letters than they post?, Promises lovers
make when it gets late, Freud's Footnotes and
Stealing the Mona Lisa, and co-author, with David
Corfield, of Why Do People Get Ill? He is
Honorary Visiting Professor in the School of Human and
Life Sciences, Roehampton University.
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