Bipolar Disorder
A Short History of Bipolar Disorder
The concept of bipolar disorder is surprisingly modern.
Updated June 23, 2024 Reviewed by Kaja Perina

The terms for the bipolar poles, ‘melancholy’ (depression) and ‘mania’, both have their origins in Ancient Greek.
‘Melancholy’ derives from melas [black] and chole [bile], because Hippocrates thought that melancholy results from an excess of black bile.
‘Mania’ is related to menos [spirit, force, passion]; mainesthai [to rage, go mad]; and mantis [prophet, seer], and ultimately comes down from the Indo-European root men- [mind].
‘Depression’, the clinical term for melancholy, is much more recent in origin, and derives from the Latin deprimere [to press down].
The History of Bipolar Disorder
The idea of a relationship between melancholy and mania can be traced back to the Ancient Greeks, and in particular to Aretæus of Cappadocia, a physician and philosopher in the time of Nero or Vespasian (first century CE). Aretæus described a group of people who would ‘laugh, play, dance night and day, and sometimes go openly to the market crowned, as if victors in some contest of skill’ only, at other times, to be ‘torpid, dull, and sorrowful’. He suggested that both extremes arose from the self-same condition, although this idea did not catch on.
Indeed, the modern concept of bipolar disorder only arose in the nineteenth century. In 1854, the psychiatrists Jules Baillarger and Jean-Pierre Falret independently presented descriptions of the condition to the Académie de Médecine in Paris. Baillarger called it, folie à double forme [dual-form insanity], and Falret, folie circulaire [circular insanity]. Falret observed that the condition clustered in families, and postulated a strong genetic basis.
In the early 1900s the eminent German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) studied the natural course of the untreated condition and found it to be punctuated by more or less symptom-free intervals. On this basis, he distinguished it from dementia præcox [schizophrenia], and named it manisch-depressives Irresein [German, manic-depressive psychosis]. He emphasized that, compared to dementia præcox, it had a more episodic course and a more benign outcome.
Curiously, Kraepelin did not distinguish people with both manic and depressive episodes from those with only depressive episodes with psychotic symptoms. It is only in the 1950s that the psychiatrists Karl Kleist and Karl Leonhard proposed this division, from which stems the contemporary emphasis on bipolarity, and thus on mania or hypomania, as the defining feature of the condition.
The term ‘bipolar disorder’ first appeared in the third, 1980 edition of the DSM, and has gradually replaced the older term ‘manic-depressive illness’, which, although more descriptive, led to people with the condition being stigmatized as ‘maniacs’.
Read more in The Meaning of Madness.