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 2009 Healy reminds us that we need to ask ourselves what it means to be ill and what it means to be well. ... Read more
Garan Holcombe California Literary Review 2008 A learned and polemical volume in the series Biographies of Disease published by the Johns Hopkins University Press... Healy is an intellectual bomb-thrower, a most erudite and clever doctor with an anarchic streak that he cannot quite reconcile with disinterested historical inquiry. He is interesting precisely for the subtle detonations that he sets off in the reader's mind, rattling the received ideas too comfortably ensconced there.
Algis Valiunas New Atlantis 2009 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 2009 Provides a probing and challenging commentary on the state of contemporary psychiatry.
Allan Beveridge British Journal of Psychiatry 2009 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 Mania is a work that deserves a wide readership.
Gerald N. Grob, Ph.D. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Well-written and compelling... I encourage you to read this exceptional book.
Tom Olson, PhD Nursing History Review 2010 The book is a scholarly one [and] Healy's wide knowledge of the facts of the history is impressive.
Paul Skerritt Health and History 2009 [Healy's] work has enriched our historiographic discourse enormously and social historians of medicine can only greet that as good news.
Eric J. Engstrom Social History of Medicine 2009 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.
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen London Review of Books 2010 Show Less