Special issue on circular insanity and beyond: Historic contributions of French psychiatry to contemporary concepts and research on bipolar disorder

The original contribution of French psychiatry to what today we call bipolar disorder has its roots in 1854 in two papers that were presented in the French National Academy of Medicine by Falret and Baillarger. This event was celebrated in the same Academy in Paris in February, 2004 at its 150th anniversary. Because nearly all of the contributions of French alienists to the field of mood disorders have not been translated into English, their pioneering contributions are not as well known to the Anglophone world as those of Kraepelin, who in 1899 integrated French and other German work into his systematic treatise. To the best of our knowledge, the present special issue is the first monograph in English devoted to the pioneering French contributions in the field of mood disorders as well as contemporary research on bipolar disorder in France, Italy and the United States which supports and extends them.