The other side of bipolar disorder

摘要

Aristotle's claim that "no great genius has ever existed without a strain of madness" (1) has been cited by many professionals and patient advocacy groups over the years. However, the link between mental illness-bipolar disorder in particular-and exceptional cognitive or creative ability has been based mainly on anecdotal reports (2). In this issue, Higier and colleagues (3) try to shed light on why a disorder such as bipolar disorder, with a detrimental effect on brain function, maintains its prevalence across generations. Their hypothesis is that bipolar disorder is associated with traits that are advantageous to mate selection (e.g., creativity, sociability, positive affect) and thus counteract the disorder's biological disadvantage. In other words, this is a model of reproductive fitness in which an allele with higher fitness will be more likely to be represented in future generations because of a feature of that allele-coding for the advantageous traits assessed in the study-and not because of random effects