Narrative identity under bipolar disorder: Selfhood, continuity, and psychiatric disruption

Narrative theories of personal identity often link selfhood to autobiographical continuity. Bipolar disorder presents a challenge to this view because manic, hypomanic, depressive, and mixed episodes can involve changes in mood, energy, judgment, agency, memory, sleep, and future orientation, although their presentation varies substantially across individuals and episodes. This article examines what bipolar disorder reveals about narrative identity. It argues that bipolar disorder does not refute narrative accounts of selfhood, but it exposes their tendency to assume more stable conditions of affect, agency, temporality, and autobiographical coherence than psychiatric life may permit. Drawing on philosophy of psychiatry, phenomenology, narrative identity theory, qualitative research, and selected bipolar memoirs, the article develops an account of narrative identity as provisional, recursive, and repeatedly reconstructed. Bipolar disorder can place pressure on the relation between the experiencing self, the remembering self, and the narrating self, while trust and diagnosis can further reorganize how past actions, present agency, and future possibilities are understood. The article concludes that narrative identity under bipolar disorder is not a settled autobiographical achievement. It is an ongoing and vulnerable practice of self-relation under changing affective, diagnostic, and social conditions.