Bipolar affective disorder dates back throughout history. The ancient history of mental disorders, including bipolar disorder, was shrouded in a cloud of fear, ignorance and misunderstanding. Both melancholy, the older term used for depression and mania, have their origins in ancient Greek. Melancholy is born from the Greek words “melas” symbolizing black and “chole” meaning bile. Like Hippocrates, the father of medicine himself believed that depression was born from an excess of black bile. Mania is derived from “menos” for life force and “mainesthai” – the term used to describe rage and madness. Aretaeus of Cappadocia, an illustrious Greek physician at the turn of the century, examined and scrutinized the relationship between mania and melancholy during evolution. of bipolar disorder. In his work "On the etiology and symptomatology of chronic diseases", he indicated that the two mood patterns are the consequence of a similar disorder. This link, however, was not noticed until much later. In 1621, an English clergyman and scholar named Robert Burton published a book – The Anatomy of Melancholy containing a review of depression, its causes, symptoms and cures. Drawing on the views of Hippocrates, Burton believed that melancholy was caused, among other theories, by an excess of black bile. He also cited poor diet, fear, supernatural causes, old age and temperament as likely causes. The takeaway from Burton's work is that melancholy has been described as a mental illness in its own right. Théophile Bonet, a Swiss doctor, in 1686 became one of the first to associate mania and depression under the name “manico-melancholicus”. Falret and Baillarger, two eminent French doctors studied and described the symptoms and ...... middle of paper ......ls with loss and separation from the main object of one's life - the mother, even if this is only temporarily. Feelings of sadness and depression remain, and the child learns to tolerate these feelings or cope with them through manic defenses. Klein saw the depressive position as the main point of manic-depressive states and introduced the alliance between the depressive position and manic-depressive states. In the 1970s, Brumback, Weinberg et al. derived and adapted adult criteria to juvenile cases in order to diagnose mania and depression in children, which provided a basis of criteria for bipolar disorder that was published in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) III in 1980. Since the 1980s however it has been claimed that adult criteria can be used to diagnose children, taking into account differences in age and the child's developmental stage..