Losing the pieces to the bipolar puzzle

Philip Dawdy over at Furious Seasons is furious, although perhaps not as furious as he should be.  Jennifer Egan has just written an incendiary piece for The New York Times Magazine all about the latest mania for pediatric bipolar disorder (which can be found here, although you might need a subscription).  In “The Bipolar Puzzle,” she brings together intimate portraits of families struggling with angry and irritable children, expert interviews, and demographic details, all of which come together to present a terrifying picture of the latest epidemic.

There is a tremendous difference between inconsistency and objectivity, but Egan seems to have confused the two.  Throughout the piece, Egan describes bipolar disorder as a biologically inherited disability, focusing on the rambunctious and often frightening behavior of preadolescent children who oscillate between excessive love and terrifying violence.  Parents are victims in her story, relying on the advice of experts and the magic of drugs to rescue them from a nightmarish existence.  It is only at the end of the long article, and only in passing, that Egan deems to suggest that there may only exist scant and highly suspect evidence that bipolar disorder as currently (mis)understood can even exist as such in children.

Egan drowns cultural and social factors in a sea of psychotropic agents and genetic determinism, cycles between references to pediatric bipolar disorder as a fact of life or truth of nature and pediatric bipolar disorder as a phantom menace, and relies on behavioristic accounts of violence and aggression rather than on the subjectivities of congealing consciousnesses to describe the effects and symptoms of a menacing disease.

After I cool off a bit and take a chill pill of my own, I’ll write a more coherent and thoughtful reaction to the piece.  It’s precisely this kind of careless and lazy cultural commentary that reminds me why I do what I do.