Check out this article on the trend upward in bipolar disorder diagnoses. Maybe what interests me most is the way the availability of new treatments seems to push doctors into diagnoses they might not have made before — it's as if the drug is offering a new paradigm for human behavior. This is certainly what we've seen with Prozac et al. I'm tempted to blame advertisments/marketing for the phenomenon... profit motivates everything these days, even how we understand ourselves.
But I think that might be unfair. In the case of bipolar disorder, as with other psychoses, we know so little about what causes the condition that the treatments can tell us more about what's wrong than the condition itself. In a scientific atmosphere where diseases are clinically defined as the condition that responds to x treatment, it's easy to see why doctors might start diagnosing this or that where there's neither.
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