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,

-19-