Journey into the Heart of Bipolarity

The book you are holding is out of the ordinary. Art book or a clinical manual
for psychiatry describing bipolarity, it is both of these and neither at the
same time. Bipolar disorder or manic-depressive illness is a mood disorder by
which persons are afflicted in cyclic episodes. During these episodes, the
patients' affects, thoughts and motor activity are modified in every area of
their mental and relational life.

An illness of extremes in mania and depression, bipolar disorder deeply
changes, for the patients, their immediate experience. The aim of this work is
to describe some of these experiences. Its originality is to attempt to do so
by using art works as a mediator, in themselves and independently from the
mental life of the artists who created them. Readers are thus solicited by the
text, of course, which attempts to help them understand the patients' mental
world, but also by the emotions they will be made to feel by the works that
are presented. These are therefore not direct illustrations of the patients'
psychological states: they help to perceive them as a whole, from both a
sensitive and an intellectual point of view.

A psychiatrist and two art specialists joined to provide this dual view on the
subjective experience of a patient. The emotion inspired by the works
reproduced and commented on here will enable clinicians to gain a better
understanding of the mental life of their patients. Patients will also be able
to understand part of their experience of the disorder, as reflected in the
works. Finally, this book, as beautiful as it is educational, is not
exclusively reserved for psychiatrists and patients. It proposes a double
reading, sensitive and scholarly, in a text that is accessible to the broadest
audience. The patients' familiar circles and art amateurs will discover in it
both a fine analysis and a singular view on mental life and on a number of
works of art.