"The point here is this: Were it not for those “disordered” genes, you wouldn’t have extremely creative, successful people.  Being in the absolute middle of every trait spectrum, not too extreme in any one direction, makes you balanced, but rather boring.  The tails of the spectrum, or the fringe, is where all the exciting stuff happens.  Some of the exciting stuff goes uncontrolled and ends up being a psychological disorder, but some of those people with the traits that define Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, ADHD, and other psychological conditions, have the fortunate gift of high cognitive control paired with those traits, and end up being the creative geniuses that we admire, aspire to be like, and desperately need in this world.

…If we were to be able to identify the genes for Schizophrenia, or for Bipolar Disorder, or for ADHD… would we want to eliminate them? If we were making a “designer baby”, would you choose those genes to be added into your child’s genome?

I say yes."

"Spitzer grew up to be a psychiatrist…his dislike of psychoanalysis remaining undimmed…then, in 1973, an opportunity to change everything presented itself. There was a job going editing the next edition of a little-known spiral-bound booklet called DSM - the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.<br />
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DSM is simply a list of all the officially recognised mental illnesses & their symptoms. Back then it was a tiny book that reflected the Freudian thinking predominant in the 1960s. It had very few pages, & very few readers.<br />
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What nobody knew when they offered Spitzer the job was that he had a plan: to try to remove human judgement from psychiatry. He would create a whole new DSM that would eradicate all that crass sleuthing around the unconscious; it hadn't helped his mother. Instead it would be all about checklists. Any psychiatrist could pick up the manual, & if the patient's symptoms tallied with the checklist for a particular disorder, that would be the diagnosis."

"Científicos británicos dicen tener "evidencia clara" de que a mayor capacidad intelectual de un individuo, mayor es el riesgo que tiene de desarrollar un trastorno bipolar."

"Virginia Woolf’s mental illness may have ultimately defined her craft—one that rejected convention in a decades-long attempt to portray the very character of consciousness."

"...BBC documentary on rise of Freudian psychology, public relations, & conceptions of individual over last century. To what extent do psychology & public relations shape the self under network culture? This is crucial to understand. In part, I think the answer can be found in the disorders that afflict a culture. Neuresthenia & hysteria dominated psychology in the late 19th century, giving way to afflictions like psychosis & neurosis, and more recently to bipolar disorder and aspberger’s. This is a thumbnail sketch & I certainly need to elaborate it, but these afflictions could be seen as a map of the unresolved tensions within society. Moreover, popular remedies feedback on society, altering it. Thus, this WSJ article suggesting that Prozac impacted our way of thinking about the economy, exacerbating the bubble.