Emily Martin

• Martin has publicly described living first with depression and later with manic depression, the term she prefers for bipolar disorder. By the late 1990s, she had begun drawing on her own experience of the condition in her anthropological research. [2]
• In Bipolar Expeditions, Martin writes from the dual perspective of an anthropologist and someone living with bipolar disorder. Her own experience became part of a broader study of how bipolar disorder is understood by people who live with it, clinicians, support groups, and the wider culture. [1]

• Martin has described fighting a private battle with depression and, later, manic depression while continuing her academic career. [2]
• She has also described experiencing vivid visual hallucinations. At an early bipolar support-group meeting, she told the group that at times her visual field seemed to tear apart “as if it were a movie screen being ripped and torn.” She recalled that even some other people in the group were reluctant to discuss experiences like hers openly. [2]

• Martin has said that she has received psychiatric treatment and taken medication for her mood disorder. She has recalled finding it reassuring when her psychiatrist explained her illness in terms of neurotransmitters, because she understood this to mean that her problems were not entirely within her control. [1]

• Martin has written extensively about the stigma attached to bipolar disorder and the assumption that people with the diagnosis are inherently irrational or unable to function. While teaching at Princeton, she offered to help establish a bipolar support group for students. She recalled being told that students with such serious mental-health problems would not be able to function in Princeton’s demanding environment. Martin did not disclose her own diagnosis in that conversation because she feared she might also be judged incapable of functioning there. [1]
• More broadly, Martin has argued that American culture treats mania paradoxically: traits associated with manic energy, creativity, and productivity may be celebrated, while people actually diagnosed with bipolar disorder can be treated as less rational or less fully capable. Much of Bipolar Expeditions examines this tension and the ways psychiatric labels can shape how a person is perceived. [1]

“I did not tell her that I too had the diagnosis because at the time this admission felt too terrible to bring to light.”

— Emily Martin [1]