Goodwin (2000) famously argued that bipolar disorder was the Cinderella of psychiatry. It certainly should not be: there is no doubt of the anguish caused by the condition, in particular the excess of natural mortality and the great excess of death by suicide (Ösby et al. 2001). In this issue, Mitchell et al. (2004) report that 26% of their cases of bipolar disorder had attempted suicide at some point. This reflects the sheer persistence of personal suffering: Judd and colleagues (2002, 2003) demonstrated in a long and detailed follow-up that patients with bipolar disorder were symptomatic at least half the time. The Australian National Survey of Psychotic Disorders found levels of disability in affective psychosis equal to those of schizophrenia (Jablensky et al. 2000), and bipolar cases are more likely to score highly on measures of disability than unipolar cases (Mitchell et al. 2004). People with bipolar disorder are more likely to be single, widowed or divorced than both the general populace and those with unipolar depression (Mitchell et al. 2004).