Manic Depression

Since the 1950s, the psychiatric community has had the benefit of antimanic and antidepressant medications to treat manic-depressive illnesses. These medications were developed using the work of Emil Kraepelin, a German physician who wrote about mental illness in the late nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century. Kraepelin had carefully noted distinguishing symptoms among mental patients and had followed the course of the various illnesses in many of them. He was the first to distinguish what he called dementia praecox, now called schizophrenia, and was able to differentiate this illness from manic depression.

During the 1950s and 1960s, a group at Washington University in St. Louis applied Kraepelin's method and began a classification system that led to the publication of the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which was published in 1952. In 1994, the DSM-IV was published. As of 2003, text revision in the DSM-IV-TR ("TR" for "text revision") made it the most current DSM available. The DSM presents a standard set of definitions for psychiatric illnesses. It also presents the symptoms and the number of them that must be present to diagnosis a particular psychiatric illness, such as manic depression.

Another problem facing the diagnosis of depression or mania is the fact that other medical conditions can cause similar symptoms. Among them are illnesses such as thyroid diseases, infectious diseases (the flu), cancers of the central nervous system, neurological disorders (multiple sclerosis), blood diseases, and even some reactions to metal toxicity.