"A Fire in the Blood": metaphors of bipolar disorder in Jamison's An Unquiet Mind.

Content analysis of three chapters of Jamison's memoir, An Unquiet Mind, shows that depression, mania, and Bipolar Disorder have a common metaphoric core as a sequential process of suffering and adversity that is a form of malevolence and destruction. Depression was down and in, while mania was up, in and distant, circular and zigzag, a powerful force of quickness and motion, fieriness, strangeness, seduction, expansive extravagance, and acuity. Bipolar Disorder is down and away and a sequential and cyclical process that partakes of the metaphors of its component moods. We conclude that metaphors of mood disorders share a number of structural features and are consistent across different authors.