A Look At Bipolarism, Politics, and Philosphy

American History is more than just politics and war. True American History is about people. My current read is Katharine Graham's Biography A Personal History. A good book will always raise questions within yourself, either about you as an individual or about sections of history. Two questions rose from reading this past week, one deals with the medical profession and more specifically psychology, and the other is that of a high-profile political figure. I am going to explore these two sections in the next two weeks and take you through my journey of learning about these particular pieces in our history that have been displayed through literature.

Katharine Graham's husband was what psychologists refer to as a manic-depressive. While reading about this time in her life a number of questions came to mind about the disorder and the type of treatment that he was receiving. This time in their life was a difficult one from reading in her book, and ran what happened on a personal level and on the level of the paper, it affected lives of many, many people until his death.

The doctor that they were seeing had them read up on existentialist philosophy and "... Faber believed that labeling something, giving a name to a disorder, changed how the patient viewed himself and was viewed by those around him." (Pg. 249) This makes me wonder, it would be difficult to go through something as painful as manic depression and be leaned on and never know exactly what was going on expect that something was dreadfully wrong. When reading about existentialist philosophy, renowned Russian Author Dostoyevsky is to be included in this group. Existentialism is not necessarily a philosophy but more of a label. Existentialism is a way of looking at life as always particular and individual. Walter Kaufmann said this about the philosophy "The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever and especially of systems, a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial academic; and remote from life - that is the heart of existentialism." The philosophy started in the early 1930's and continues to today. There are many various views on this, and many authors have been included, all in various places within the realm of this philosophy. Existentialism deals with raising the question of what is being, what is man and what is his purpose. To take this view and apply it towards a disorder such as Manic Depression would and can be detrimental with long lasting effects because it takes a passive stance to fixing the problem.

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