Bipolar Disorder Isn’t a ‘Chemical Imbalance’: Here’s What the Science Actually Shows

Many of us were told that mood disorders come from a simple imbalance of brain chemicals. It feels like that’s what doctors said in an effort to simplify things for patients (and talk down to us) and give us motivation to take our medication. (After all, if medication corrects the imbalance, why wouldn’t you take it?) That shorthand stuck, but modern psychiatry doesn’t endorse a single‑chemical (or even chemical alone) theory. Instead, we understand that bipolar disorder is multifactorial and influenced by biology, life events, and psychology, and is measurable across several biological systems. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) guidance explicitly frames bipolar disorder as a disorder of biological,…