Journey into the heart of bipolarity

The book you are holding is out of the ordinary. Art book or a clinical manual for psychiatry describing bipolarity, it is both of these and neither at the same time. Bipolar disorder or manic-depressive illness is a mood disorder by which persons are afflicted in cyclic episodes. During these episodes, the patients' affects, thoughts and motor activity are modified in every area of their mental and relational life.

An illness of extremes in mania and depression, bipolar disorder deeply changes, for the patients, their immediate experience. The aim of this work is to describe some of these experiences. Its originality is to attempt to do so by using art works as a mediator, in themselves and independently from the mental life of the artists who created them. Readers are thus solicited by the text, of course, which attempts to help them understand the patients' mental world, but also by the emotions they will be made to feel by the works that are presented. These are therefore not direct illustrations of the patients' psychological states: they help to perceive them as a whole, from both a sensitive and an intellectual point of view.

A psychiatrist and two art specialists joined to provide this dual view on the subjective experience of a patient. The emotion inspired by the works reproduced and commented on here will enable clinicians to gain a better understanding of the mental life of their patients. Patients will also be able to understand part of their experience of the disorder, as reflected in the works. Finally, this book, as beautiful as it is educational, is not exclusively reserved for psychiatrists and patients. It proposes a double reading, sensitive and scholarly, in a text that is accessible to the broadest audience. The patients' familiar circles and art amateurs will discover in it both a fine analysis and a singular view on mental life and on a number of works of art.