The earliest mention of mood disorder of which we have record is from classical
Greece. Hippocrates, in the fifth century B.C., was aware of both mania and
depression as medical problems, and he recognized their chronicity, but he
did not know that they are phases of the same illness.In the second century
B.C., Areteus, an eminent Greek physician like Hippocrates, recognized that
mania and depression could alternate in the same person.He described the
personality types that accompany the moods: the self-sacrificing, pious, guilt‐
haunted sufferer of depression; the gay, obstreperous, rash bon vivant of mania.
After Areteus the concept of manic-depression disappeared from medical
writings until the nineteenth century, when French psychiatrists reported the
existence of a cyclical disorder of mood.The man who formally described
the illness and gave it the term "manic-depressive insanity" was Emil Kraepelin,
a German psychiatrist.In his Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, published in 1889,
Kraepelin provided an almost-complete description of the moods, behavior,
and thought patterns of manic-depressives.The novel data on manic-depression
that have appeared since Kraepelin are the sociological, biochemical, and
pharmacological studies of the past three decades.

The American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic and statistical manual
of mental disorders describes manic episodes as follows: "The essential feature
is a distinct period when the predominant mood is either elevated, expansive
or irritable and when there are associated symptoms of the manic syndrome.
These symptoms include hyperactivity, pressure of speech, flight of ideas,
inflated self-esteem, decreased need for sleep, distractibility, and excessive
involvement in activities that have a high potential for painful consequences,

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