得了躁郁症的小女孩Rebecca在过量饮用了医疗药酒后死亡，在死之前，她同时还在药效过度的思瑞康和抗痉挛剂，她的父母被控一级谋杀罪……
Early in the morning of December 13, 2006, police officers from the small town of Hull, MA, near Boston, arrived at the home of Michael and Carolyn Riley in response to an emergency call. Their four-year-old daughter, Rebecca, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder two years earlier. When the officers reached the house, they found Rebecca sprawled out on the floor next to her teddy bear. She had died from an overdose of the medication cocktail prescribed to her by her psychiatrist, Dr. Kayoko Kifuji. At the time of her death, Rebecca was taking Seroquel®, a powerful antipsychotic drug, Depakote®, a no less powerful anticonvulsant and mood-stabilizing drug, and clonidine, a hypotensive drug used as a sedative. Rebecca’s parents were charged with first-degree murder, but her doctor’s role must also be questioned. How could she have prescribed psychotropic medications normally intended for adults suffering from psychotic mania to a two-year-old? Yet the medical center where Rebecca had been treated issued a statement describing Dr. Kifuji’s treatment as “appropriate and within responsible professional standards.” In an interview with the Boston Globe, Dr. Janet Wozniak, director of the Pediatric Bipolar Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, went even further: “We support early diagnosis and treatment because the symptoms of [bipolar] disorder are extremely debilitating and impairing. […] It’s incumbent on us as a field to understand more which preschoolers need to be identified and treated in an aggressive way.” On July 1, 2009, a Plymouth County Grand Jury dropped all criminal charges against Dr. Kifuji. How did we come to this? As the psychiatrist and historian David Healy points out in his latest book, Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), very few people had heard of bipolar disorder before 1980, when it was introduced in the DSM-III – the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association – and it was only in 1996 that a group of doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital, led by Joseph Biederman and Janet Wozniak, first proposed that some children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might in fact suffer from bipolar disorder. But whoever googles “bipolar disorder” today is likely to learn that the illness has always been with us. It’s just a new name, we are told, for what used to be called manic depression, a severe mood disorder characterized by oscillations between states of manic hyperactivity and deep depression. Healy has no trouble demonstrating that this is a retrospective illusion. “Manic-depressive insanity” (a term coined in 1899 by Emil Kraepelin) was a relatively rare illness – ten cases per one million people each year, Healy claims, or 0.001 percent of the general population. By contrast, the prevalence of bipolar disorder is supposed to be much higher. In 1994, the US National Comorbidity survey estimated that 1.3 percent of the American population suffered from bipolar disorder. Four years later, the psychiatrist Jules Angst upped the figure to 5 percent: 5,000 times higher than the figure suggested by Healy. Are we really talking about the same thing? Or did the name create a new thing? Healy favors the second hypothesis. The term bipolar disorder, he explains, was simultaneously introduced in 1966 by Jules Angst and Carlo Perris, who proposed cleanly separating unipolar depressions from bipolar disorders (they were contradicting Kraepelin, who believed that both sets of disorders were presentations of one and the same manic-depressive illness). While their conceptual move has been hailed as a breakthrough, it is hard to understand what the point is – it muddles the diagnosis instead of clarifying it. In practice, how are we to distinguish a unipolar depression from a bipolar disorder in a patient who has yet to experience a manic episode? Nonetheless, instead of seeing this incoherence as a reason for rejecting