Published for the first time in DSM IIII, bipolar disorder has brought a new way of understanding and experiencing emotional oscillations, strongly impregnated with the frameworks of psychopharmacology, neurosciences, and with new conceptualizations of affective variations. Aiming to investigate the meanings, sociabilities and ways of being constituted from this diagnosis, an ethnography was performed in the most numerous Brazilian Facebook group about bipolar disorder, which identified the following aspects: the network facilitates the production of an experiential expertise; the idea that “only those who suffer from it can understand it” strengthens mutual identification; in opposition to manic depression, as it was formerly called, bipolar disorder acquires a certain positivity, becoming a source of humor; drug therapy is the main resource used to manage affective life, making patients partially independent from the physician when they handle these resources among themselves; bipolar disorder is dissociated from the “self”.
Virtual ethnography; Online social network; Bipolar disorder; Experiential expertise; Psychopharmacology