In her ethnography of manic depression Bipolar Explorations: Mania and Depression in American Culture, anthropologist Emily Martin notes that in the various support groups in which she participated for her study, people used the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] categories to talk about their illnesses rather than talking about their inner psychic states. Martin, herself “living under the description of bipolar,” realizes that while she has had years of regular one-on-one conversations with psychiatrists and social workers who taught her to recognize and describe the nuances of her psychological experiences, the people in the support groups have not. Most insurance does not pay for long-term psychotherapy and most people do not have the resources to pay for it privately. Deprived of the opportunity to explore their inner psychic states, the people she encountered in the support groups had only the language and categories of the DSM to talk about themselves. “Exploration of inner experience has the potential to challenge the uniform and bureaucratic language of the DSM. Insofar as people use DSM categories instead of exploring the phenomena of their experience firsthand, they may have only the illusion of communicating with other people what it is like to be, say, manic” (142)…