Emily Martin - Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture
From 12.10-15.11
I've come up with this phrase, living under the description of bipolar disorder as a way of dealing with the question that I get all the time:is bipolar disorder biological (is it a biological condition) or is it culturally constructed...my opinion about this is that everything human is both biological and culturally constructed and it is probably a fool's errand to try and tease the two apart in any definitive way.
So the phrase is meant to resist the apparent necessity of such a choice (this or that) - to reject the choice and to say that both sides of this apparent dichotomy are real, both are material, both are symbolic and both are filled with the ability or desire to imagine the world.
I worry that talking about bipolar disorder as culturally constructed might led one to ignore the very real material effects of this diagnosis - this and any diagnosis, especially psychiatric ones. A psychiatric diagnosis is a material fact. If you get one and it's a major one it has immediate material effects on employment, insurance, on life expectancy, admission to all kinds of contexts. So it's not culturally constructed exactly, do you understand what I'm saying? It's real, it has material effects.
I won't transcribe the rest but it's very helpful, a tree metaphor to say that though different people/cultures may describe one thing in different ways, it's still a real thing and it's still the same thing.
Another good point about how though when a loved one gets bipolar it can seem like their whole person goes with them, it's not true. They don't morph from A to B - that's crazy! They. are. not. a. bipolar. THING. Bipolar just becomes one part of their experience; true, a very big part at times but not all-encompassing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67QCOpk6EgE
http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(08)60152-X.pdf
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