beyond BIPOLAR: Ancient Realms New Directions

Australian born psychiatrist Dr James Le Bas PhD is the author of beyond Bipolar, Ancient Realms, New Directions. As a medical sufferer himself, his career was awakened in a basement ward in Manilla, the first of four hospitalisations for psychosis, depression, and mania. His new book explores the role of ostracism in the determination of what he has termed xPolar illness and incorporates the models of Jaak Panksepp and Jeffrey Gray. He is a devotee of community psychiatry and dates the birth of social value (prestige), which is complicit in mood disorders, at around fifty thousand years ago as societies grappled with the value of their members. As a junior doctor he discovered the joy of talking to people and he has been a devotee of individual and family psychotherapy ever since. In his new book he deals with the difficult issues – love, addiction, and loss, as he faces up to the mystery of mental illness, both at large and within himself, with his new mode of understanding – the Tesseract. He challenges the risk of disability, writing poetry near Melbourne’s bay – its “big lung”.