Did Hypomania play a role in American History? Is immigration the reason for our nation’s Hypomanic traits?
“The Americans are good fighters with nerve and recklessness..”
— a German officer once said of American soldiers in WWI. The Americans were often described as “reckless”, “wild”, and “foolish” in comparison with their British and French counterparts during WWI. This was the first time in a while that America had truly taken to the world stage after a period of isolationism, and the first impression left upon the rest of the world was one of craziness and recklessness. But what if this craziness was what made America the nation that it is today?
Hypomania — a condition associated with bipolar disorder that is characterized by enthusiasm, reckless behavior, and extravagant ideation — has been a very real part of our history since our nation’s founding. Alexander Hamilton, a key Founding Founder that ensured the economic survival of the new nation after a hard-fought revolution, was described as abnormally “reckless, impatient, unusually active at work and other pursuits, and supremely confident of success.” He was an immigrant and orphan, able to rise above his station in this young nation through his hypomanic temperament.
As a nation of immigrants like Alexander Hamilton, we have to ask ourselves — are we a hypomanic nation? While there is no real substantiated data on the prevalence of hypomania or bipolar disorder in immigrant populations, Peter C. Whybrow, a psychiatrist at UCLA, states that Americans have a higher prevalence of the D4–7 allele — a gene correlated with risk taking behaviors. This makes complete sense, since people that have greater recklessness, impulsivity, and risk-taking behaviors build up the perfect profile of an immigrant. To think that one would leave everything behind — friends, family, familiarity — and risk it all takes a certain degree of daring that not everybody possesses. Perhaps, as a nation of immigrants, the hypomanic traits of our immigrant forefathers have been passed on through the generations.
The supposed prevalence of hypomanic traits in the US population may have in fact contributed to our reputation as a country of innovation. Our nation has oftentimes been associated with entrepreneurial and innovative pursuits — from the Californian Gold Rush migration to the Wright Brothers’ discovery of flight. Thomas Edison’s lightbulb, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Henry Ford’s automobile, and were all uniquely American entrepreneurial inventions. Grandiose ideas, impulsivity, and riskiness — all hypomanic traits — were integral aspects of these failure-turned-successes. Aside from their predisposition for recklessness, the uniquely American culture of the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream has attracted and cultivated many of these entrepreneurial minds.
This idea of a hypomanic America is not to promote the myth of American Exceptionalism, but rather to speculate what makes the US so different that others would oftentimes single out our nation out as reckless and entrepreneurial. We don’t yet have much concrete research on why or even if hypomania plays a role in this nation’s success, but the observational evidence — though speculative at best — shows how the United States has been subjected to a high degree of hypomanic traits that played a huge role in making this country a one-of-a-kind nation that has since made it’s mark on history.
