A Mood Apart: Depression, Mania, and Other Afflictions of the Self.

• Author: Kreyche, Gerald F.

This important book is about moods (emotions) through which people interact with family, friends, and society at large. Fundamentally, this is the emotional thermostat that copes with changes, and its purpose is to maintain a state of harmony. When that thermostat malfunctions, as is the case with manic-depressives, one's entire world comes apart.

Peter C. Whybrow, director of the University of California at Los Angeles' Neuropsychiatric Institute, offers a humanistic and biological approach to mental illness. The first chapter gives a good over-all view for the educated layman concerning mood swings, those that are normal and those that become abnormal. He discusses his own personal experience of grief and melancholy on the occasion of his father's death and projects how such experiences can alter one's outlook on life.

Moods are common to humans and animals and have played an important role in their evolutionary development. The facial expressions for anger, delight, and depression, for instance, are near universal. Moods are compared to carnival masks that both hide and proclaim. It is up to the psychiatrist to decipher them in the patient.

Sharply disagreeing with the ancient Stoics who disclaimed the importance of emotion and wished to live only the intellectual life, Whybrow points to moods' centrality in human life. About 12-15% of women and eight-10% of men in the U.S. suffer from bi-polar manic-depressive disorders. In effect, this mental illness is like an emotional cancer. The manic phase exaggerates energy, happiness, creativity, etc., while in the depressed state, these shrink to...