Bipolar Disorder

Christopher Stone

BEH/225

11-30-2012

Bipolar disorder is one of the most common mental disorders. Approximately 5.7 million American adults suffer from the illness. That is roughly 2.6 percent of the entire population. This is a disease that has affected many people since Emil Kraepelin formulated the term "manic depression" in the early nineteen hundreds. Bipolar disorder was later called by it's current name, distinguishing it from Unipolar disorder in the early 1950's by Karl Leonhard.

The renaming, and distinguishing, of Bipolar disorder became a huge leap in the general mass's understanding of mental disease in general. As Dr. Gardenswartz put it, "Once there was a difference between Bipolar and other disorders, individuals suffering from...