Thursday, November 16, 2006

Inspiration's pathogens...

Extreme mood swings, when removed from the sphere of poets and historians and placed in the more modern, analytical clinics of psychologists and psychiatrists, loose their association, however tumultuous, with growth, sensuality, creativity and other positive attributes, becoming instead representations of psychopathology. This is, in many ways, understandable. Clinicians are called on to treat symptoms, not to mystify them, and clinical objectivity is essential to avoid the risks of overlooking or minimizing the patient’s pain and suicide potential. For these and many other reasons, a psychopathological approach to mood disorders has resulted in a psychiatric literature generally slighting the positive aspects of affective illness, especially manic-depressive illness and its variants.

Frederick Kay Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, Manic Depressive Illness, Oxford University Press, 1990.
p. 332

No comments: