The poetics of bipolar disorder

Abstract

This article explores the role of affect in the disorganized language and thought that can manifest itself in bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder, or as it was previously known, manic-depressive illness, can produce psychotic language and thought in its more extreme forms. During the production of discourse in bipolar disorder, there is a strong correlation between the underlying affective state, i.e., depression, euthymia, hypomania, and mania, and linguistic and cognitive performance. A psycholinguistic model of the dynamics between language, thought, and affect in bipolar disorder based on McNeill’s (1992, 2000) concept of a “Growth Point” is proposed. In particular, the poetic structural phases of discourse production in bipolar disorder, which vary according to the underlying affective state, provide a phenomenological bridge between the psychotic discourse of mania and normal language production.