The book you are holding is out of the ordinary. Art book or a clinical manual for

psychiatry describing bipolarity, it is both of these and neither at the same time.

Bipolar disorder or manic-depressive illness is a mood disorder by which persons

are afflicted in cyclic episodes. During these episodes, the patients' affects, thoughts

and motor activity are modified in every area of their mental and relational life.

An illness of extremes in mania and depression, bipolar disorder deeply changes, for

the patients, their immediate experience. The aim of this work is to describe some

of these experiences. Its originality is to attempt to do so by using art works as a

mediator, in themselves and independently from the mental life of the artists who

created them. Readers are thus solicited by the text, of course, which attempts to

help them understand the patients' mental world, but also by the emotions they will

be made to feel by the works that are presented. These are therefore not direct

illustrations of the patients' psychological states: they help to perceive them as a

whole, from both a sensitive and an intellectual point of view.

A psychiatrist and two art specialists joined to provide this dual view on the subjective

experience of a patient. The emotion inspired by the works reproduced and

commented on here will enable clinicians to gain a better understanding of the

mental life of their patients. Patients will also be able to understand part of their

experience of the disorder, as reflected in the works. Finally, this book, as beautiful as

it is educational, is not exclusively reserved for psychiatrists and patients. It proposes

a double reading, sensitive and scholarly, in a text that is accessible to the broadest

audience. The patients' familiar circles and art amateurs will discover in it both a fine

analysis and a singular view on mental life and on a number of works of art.