Drawing heavily on primary sources and supplemented with interviews and insight gained over Healy's long career, this lucid and engaging overview of mania sheds new light on one of humankind's most vexing ailments.

In this provocative history, David Healy explores how perceptions of illness, if not illnesses themselves, are mutable over time.

Drawing heavily on primary sources and supplemented with interviews and insight gained over Healy's long career, this lucid and engaging narrative of bipolar disorder sheds new light on one of humankind's most vexing ailments.

"David Healy is indeed an enfant terrible--and a very brave man. I doubt he is on Eli Lilly's or Pfizer's Christmas card list."--Times Literary Supplement

"How did we come to apply such a serious diagnosis to vaguely depressed or irritable adults, to unruly children, and to nursing home residents? Is it simply that psychiatric science has progressed and now allows us to detect more easily an illness that had previously been ignored or misunderstood? Healy has another, more cynical explanation: the never-ending expansion of the category of bipolar disorder benefits large pharmaceutical companies eager to sell medications marketed with the disorder in mind."--London Review of Books

"A powerful political tract. As social history it provides the most detailed available account of the interactions of psychiatry and the world of pharmaceutical manufacturing."--Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

"If David Healy's intent is to present a cohesive, thorough, integrated, and provocative account of the history of the concept of mania and the evolution of what is currently called bipolar disorder, he is tremendously successful."--PsycCRITIQUES