Word: bipolar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Moore believes that Mary has bipolar disorder--most people know it as manic depression--an illness with a raft of possible symptoms, from irritability to hypersexuality. Moore theorizes that "psychosocial stressors" in Mary's life--the most crucial being the news of her father's cancer--tipped a disorder that had been mild and all but unnoticed into depression followed by a nervous breakdown. "I think she was very interested in this boy, and she had often extended relationships with students after school," Moore says. "But by [June 1996], she was overly elated, highly revved up and nearly delusional." Moore...
...LeTourneau lurch into this nightmare? The answer may be found in her DNA, encoded for blond hair, brown eyes and perhaps bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive illness. Several blood relatives filed affidavits with the court saying they had been treated for the disorder. Also, she grew up in the shadow of unapproved love: her father John Schmitz, a former ultraconservative California Congressman and college lecturer, ended his career in disgrace after fathering two children by a onetime student...
...most benign stage of bipolar depression is hypomania, a sustained high that brings great creativity, grandiosity, energy and insomnia, punctuated by short bouts of depression. Julie Moore, a psychiatrist who examined LeTourneau at length for the defense, believes this pattern describes the acclaimed teacher who, while rearing four young kids, routinely pulled all-nighters to devise projects for her elementary school students...
People with bipolar depression can function normally, even exceptionally, for years. Mozart, Poe and Van Gogh are thought to have had the disorder. But without diagnosis and medication, the sufferer risks becoming manic, delusional and attracted to risk. In 1995 LeTourneau began slipping over. Her beloved father was found to have terminal cancer. Her marriage was troubled. And in January 1996 she suffered both a miscarriage and severe depression...
...Thucydides enlisted on the side of literal, close-focus truth. His older contemporary Herodotus took the more expansive view that people's self-images and folklore and even self-delusions are as important as the hard facts of history. Myths open windows upon fears, fantasies, possibilities. The old bipolar question always comes into play when Americans, black and white, approach the facts and myths of race...