I found this analysis of Homeland pretty excellent: http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2013/oct/17/homeland-carrie-mental-health-disorders-bipolar
I stopped watching Homeland a few episodes into this season, and probably should have stopped a lot earlier. It's just useless soap drama now. I've seen too many of these shows to know where it'll end up. It wasn't always like that, though. Knowing people who suffer from heavy bipolar disorder in real life it was refreshing to see a show that seemed genuine in its approach. Mental illness is one of the most insultingly portrayed subjects in mass entertainment these days. More often than not it's a convenient excuse for shitty writing or antagonistic acts of violence. Need a memorable extroverted character? Just turn the insanity up to eleven. The plot twist makes no sense? That's because a madman has done it! The story is too convoluted and full of gaps? That's because he's batshit crazy.
It has become a stylished approach devoid of substance; a simple way to write yourself out of a corner rather than a depiction of mental deterioration. And fair enough, it works wonderfully well in some cases (The Killing Joke is a truly brilliant and groundbreaking graphic novel, for instance, even though it's completely fictitious by nature). But it also very quickly loses its appeal when there's nothing there to connect it to reality.
It would have been easy to turn Carrie into one of those characters, but Homeland seemed to be a lot more ambitious. At least initially. It just seemed like it was set up to be an important, and possibly defining, popcultural work. Claire Danes was one of the most worthy Emmy winners ever in my opinion. The show dropped the ball fairly quickly though. Nowadays Carrie's bipolarity is one of the biggest reasons that Season 3 quickly went sour.
