To become a fad, a psychiatric diagnosis requires 3 preconditions: a pressing need, an engaging story, and influential prophets. The pressing need arises from the fact that disturbed and disturbing kids are very often encountered in clinical, school, and correctional settings. They suffered and cause suffering to those around them—making themselves noticeable to families, doctors, and teachers. Everyone feels enormous pressure to do something. Previous diagnoses (especially conduct or oppositional disorder) provided little hope and no call to action. In contrast, a diagnosis or childhood Bipolar Disorder creates a justification for medication and for expanded school services. The medications have broad and nonspecific effects that are often helpful in reducing anger, even if the diagnosis is inaccurate.

— Allen Frances

Was James bipolar?” The tears returned, and I watched her battle them. “We don’t use that word in our family.” I stared at her for a moment. “Why not?”“Mum and Dad don’t believe in it.” She kept walking. “James was always … troubled. But there was nothing wrong with him, nothing more than anyone else anyway, everyone feels a bit down sometimes.”“Olivia! It was more than feeling down.” She laughed, bitterly. “I know, Dee, fuck, do I know that. I’m just telling you how it goes. The party line—what we told people when they asked.

— Hazel Butler

We're like little kids. We are little kids, but don't tell us that—we're having a fantastic time. Furthermore, we have our little house, and live our little life. Furthermore, we are the perfect young husband and wife. Furthermore, we have nonstop dinner parties—the glorious food, the fabulous friends, the gallons of wine. I sometimes feel as if I've raced off a cliff and am I spinning my legs in midair, like Wile E. Coyote. But I'm fine. It's fine. It's all going to be fine. Crazy people don't have dinner parties, do they? No.

— Marya Hornbacher

What do you know about bipolar disorder?” I almost say, What do you know about it? But I make myself breathe and smile. “Is that the Jekyll-Hyde thing?” My voice sounds flat and even. Maybe a little bored, even though my mind and body are on alert. “Some people call it manic depression. It’s a brain disorder that causes extreme shifts in mood and energy. It runs in families, but it can be treated.” I continue to breathe, even if I’m not smiling anymore, but here is what is happening: my brain and my heart are pounding out different rhythms; my hands are turning cold and the back of my neck is turning hot; my throat has gone completely dry. The thing I know about bipolar disorder is that it’s a label. One you give crazy people. I know this because I’ve taken junior-year psychology, and I’ve seen movies, and I’ve watched my father in action for almost eighteen years, even though you could never slap a label on him because he would kill you. Labels like “bipolar” say This is why you are the way you are. This is who you are. They explain people away as illnesses.

— Jennifer Niven

What is actually observed in so-called 'bipolar children'? If you read the research reports carefully, they describe broad and persistent emotional dysregulation. Although these children have mood swings, they do not develop manic or hypomanic episodes. They are moody, irritable, oppositional and likely to misbehave—like all children with disruptive behavior disorders. Their grandiose thinking usually consists of little beyond boastfulness. No evidence from genetics, neurobiology, follow-up studies or treatment response shows that this syndrome has anything in common with classical bipolarity.

— Joel Paris

When you are cursed with a bipolar mind racing thoughts are the ones that you find

— Stanley Victor Paskavich

When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.

— Marya Hornbacher

Why do they always prescribe thyroid medicine to go with the mental illness cocktails they whip up?

— Stanley Victor Paskavich

Yes I'm Bipolar, but I'm as normal as you except the times when my mind thinks like two

— Stanley Victor Paskavich

You’ve got to reach bedrock to become depressed enough before you are forced to accept the reality and enormity of the problem.

— Jonathan Harnisch