The latest trend in American psychiatry—re-diagnosing the clinically depressed as victims of bipolar disorder—is on its way to Britain. Patients previously prescribed drugs like Prozac or Seroxat are trading in their antidepressants for mood stabilisers that level out the emotional peaks and troughs that characterise bipolar. Is this a sign of genuine psychiatric progress, or merely the latest diagnostic fad? Annie Maccoby Berglof, who experienced this "diagnostic shift" herself back in the 1970s in the US, explains in the new issue of Prospect.
