information:filtering, structural:reformatting, structural:scholar_edition, structural:expansion
History

In the early 1800s, French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol 's lypemania, one of his affective monomanias, was the first elaboration on what was to become modern depression. The basis of the current conceptualization of bipolar illness can be traced back to the 1850s. In 1850, Jean-Pierre Falret described "circular insanity" (la folie circulaire, French pronunciation:); the lecture was summarized in 1851 in the Gazette des hôpitaux ("Hospital Gazette"). Three years later, in 1854, Jules-Gabriel-François Baillarger (1809–1890) described to the French Imperial Académie Nationale de Médecine a biphasic mental illness causing recurrent oscillations between mania and melancholia, which he termed la folie à double forme (French pronunciation:, "madness in double form"). Baillarger's original paper, " De la folie à double forme ", appeared in the medical journal Annales médico-psychologiques (Medico-psychological annals) in 1854.

These concepts were developed by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), who, using Kahlbaum 's concept of cyclothymia, categorized and studied the natural course of untreated bipolar patients. He coined the term manic depressive psychosis, after noting that periods of acute illness, manic or depressive, were generally punctuated by relatively symptom-free intervals where the patient was able to function normally.

The term "manic–depressive reaction " appeared in the first version of the DSM in 1952, influenced by the legacy of Adolf Meyer. Subtyping into "unipolar" depressive disorders and bipolar disorders has its origin in Karl Kleist 's concept – since 1911 – of unipolar and bipolar affective disorders, which was used by Karl Leonhard in 1957 to differentiate between unipolar and bipolar disorder in depression. These subtypes have been regarded as separate conditions since publication of the DSM-III. The subtypes bipolar II and rapid cycling have been included since the DSM-IV, based on work from the 1970s by David Dunner, Elliot Gershon, Frederick Goodwin, Ronald Fieve, and Joseph Fleiss.