(Ir)Rationality

Emily Martin is a professor of anthropology at New York University; her work focuses particularly on feminism and the anthropology of science and power; more recently, she has written a book – Bipolar Expeditions – and several articles about bipolar disorder (see below). Her interest in BP stems from her own personal experience with, and she offers an interesting and unique perspective on bipolar disorder that you don’t usually encounter.

Much of this perspective centers on the mania inherent in today’s modern capitalist society – everyone knows the stock market, has, for the last several years, demonstrated up and down tendencies that would make anyone think it needed meds – but Martin also describes the exclusion of bipolars from the human experience. I think this is a very valid point, and worth looking into.

So why are bipolars excluded from the human experience? Back in the 17th century, at the height of the Enlightenment, it was generally thought that rationality was the single most important aspect of a man. Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am,” or Kant’s idea of man as lamp which could illuminate the knowledge of the world all fed into this idea that rationality was man’s highest virtue. This idea is still extremely important today, although its been beaten up a little by various modernisms and post-modernisms.

The unfortunate thing for people who are bipolar is that they are not always one hundred percent rational then. The DSM-IV suggests that many of the behaviors associated with bipolar disorder have their roots in a fundamental irrationality including – “inflated self-esteem”, “excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences” “feelings of worthlessness and inappropriate guilt,” and “recurrent thoughts of death or recurrent suicidal ideation.”

At least part of Martin’s point in Bipolar Expeditions is that whether a person is rational or irrational is not a good criterion for their ability to participate in the human experience, firstly because the human experience is about human connection, and secondly because the line between rationality and irrationality is not as well defined as we might like to think.

To substantiate this second point, Martin gives the example of something called “double bookkeeping” which is a term used for schizophrenics who both halluciante and understand their hallucinations. Martin suggests that much the same thing is going on with bipolars; when a person is having an episode, they understand perfectly that they are acting irrationality.

And because they understand this, it becomes increasingly hard to say that there is nothing rational about this individual, and even more difficult to pin down the line between rationality and irrationality to begin with.

References

Martin, Emily. Bipolar Expeditions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2007.

Martin, Emily."Mind-Body Problems." American Ethnologist. 2000: 27(3). 569-590.

Martin, Emily."Flexible Survivors." Cultural Values. 2000: 4(4). 512-517

The Discourse of Abnormal Behavior