Book Review: 'Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disease'

By Martha Rosenberg, Evanston Roundtable Jul 23, 2008 The wisdom of giving this drug for childhood and adolescent depression has been questioned. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) ‘Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disease’ By David Healy, M.D. Has the pharmaceutical industry become the Pied Piper of Hamelin—ridding us of lethal diseases only to turn around and “take” our children? Would a physician from the 1950s “have identified the frenzy to treat bipolar disorders in infants that developed in twenty-first-century America as a mania?” In his latest book, “Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disease,” (the John Hopkins University Press), Dr. Healy, author of “Let Them Eat Prozac,” looks at the historic roots of our current “medicalized distress” in which half the population is said to suffer a mental illness at some point in life and... [read full story]