IF YOU HAVE BEEN DIAGNOSED ‘BI-POLAR’ by A Western Medical Doctor or Psychiatrist-Consider a ‘Second Opinion’
Western Medicine is plagued with misdiagnosis –
Statistics are telling…12 million Americans misdiagnosed each year. Each year in the U.S. approximately 12 million adults who seek outpatient medical care are misdiagnosed, according to a new study published in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety.Apr 17, 2014
12 million Americans misdiagnosed each year – CBS News https://www.cbsnews.com/…/12-million-americans-misdiagnosed-each-year-study-says/
The New Yorker April 1, 2019 ‘The Challenge of Going Off Psychiatric Drugs’ Https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-challenge-of-going-off-psychiatric-drugs…
Millions of Americans have taken antidepressants for many years. What happens when it’s time to stop? Diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager, Laura Delano was prescribed nineteen medications in fourteen years. You need to enable JavaScript to run this app…0:00 / 1:04:32 Audio: Listen to this article…To hear more, download the Audm iPhone app.
After listening to this Unbelievable Story- It explains the flawed Western Mentality!
Read More at the Bottom of the page or
Their Philosophy is ‘Treat the SYMPTOMS ONLY’
& Do NOT CONSIDER Our ‘Nature’ – Inherited (DNA)!
Or Our ‘Nurture’ – CAFO-GMO SAD AMERICAN DIET OF ALTERED-PROCESSED Convenience Synthetic Faux Foods!
Pharma is only a Meant to be a Temporary –
‘BRIDGE’ to Wellness – NOT FOR A LIFETIME!
Going off any Pharms – (Stop taking pills) –
Can be as dangerous as the Pharma itself!
DOSES ARE FAR TO HIGH, ORGANS START TO SHOW WARE & the SIDE EFFECTS – A HORROR SHOW!!
TAPERING WITH A DOCTOR – WHO UNDERSTANDS MORE THAT ‘TREATING THE SYMPTOMS’…(Nature needs Nurture & a physician who also ‘LETS FOOD BY THY HEALING’ will soon have Patients Preventing & Reversing the RAVAGES OF THE CAFO – GMO SAD AMERICAN DIET.
BAN GMO (like the rest of the world) CAFO-FUELED BY GMO WILL COLLAPSE! GLOBAL WARMING MAY SLOW OR REVERESE THE PROCESS?
** CAFO -‘Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation’ – BAN GMO (Their Fuel) & the CAFOS GO AWAY & 168 Greenhouse gases They Emitt!! Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn
** Foods That Can Cause Depression Dee Hinkle on LinkedInFoods That Can Cause Depression By Kelly Brogan MD https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/foods-can-cause-depression-dee-hinkle/
** New Science: Nutritional Psychiatry – Research on Depression & Mental Illness Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn There are more & more other studies revolving around this topic that support this research. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nutritional-psychiatry-research-depression-new-science-dee-hinkle/
** How to Withdraw from Disease-Causing SAD (CAFO-GMO) AMERICAN Diet (LEFT BEHIND) – Eat Wild & Local Pastured Butchers! Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date April 4, 2019
Matthew Ch 24 – (HOMILETICS) – (NIV) The Destruction of the Temple and Signs of the End Times Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date April 2, 2019
** CAFO-GM0 – Pasteurized Milk! NOT OK for Cats to Lap – RAW-‘PASTURE-RAISED’ a Health Benefit for CNA & Brain! Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date November 24, 2018
** Pastured ‘FAT’ – LARD IS BRAIN HEALTHY! CAFO-GMO ‘FAT’ CREATES ALZHEIMER’S PLAQUE! Benefits Of Pasture-Raised Meat and LARD! Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date April 3, 2019
** Eggs – Really Nature’s PERFECT FOOD? Only if NOT from CAFO-GMO Fed Poultry! Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date December 8, 2018
** Dr Guntley – ALMOST THERE-LECTINS MISSING the ‘GMO-MAGNIFICATION’ PIECE? LECTIN-FREE MAY BE A FLAWED CONCEPT
** The Omnivore’s Dilemma- FATE IN OLD AGE? In the Doctor’s Office, Hospital, Nursing Home or on the BEACH! Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date December 7, 2018
** Top 10 Health Benefits of Eating Seafood (Not Farmed & Fed CAFO- GMO) Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date January 15, 2019
** Hitler’s Revenge: IBU Wars-Not the Alcohol-But the Hops in Beer-Anheuser Bush- only’27’ IBU’S! Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date January 15, 2019
** WW II Japan’ Emperor Hirohito’s Revenge-‘Sushi’ with White Rice? Kamikaze? Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date January 15, 2019
** MODERN Pizza – Mussolini’s Revenge-Reversing Louis Pasteur & Julia Childs & Converting Betty Crocker-From DEAD-Back to LIVE Beneficial Bacteria Foods Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date January 13, 2019
** Reading Labels 101 – HIDDEN AGENDAS! & Big Business – Opposed to Truth in Labeling & Banning GMO Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date December 10, 2018
** As a Nation-Stand Up-The Organic Industry Is Lying to You!! “WSJ” Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date August 6, 2018
** Prop 37 – Mandatory Labeling for GMO- 2012 – DEFEATED – Time to Try Again? Dee Hinkle on LinkedIn Publish date December 8, 2018
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teen-ager, Laura Delano was prescribed nineteen medications in fourteen years.
Photograph by Levi Mandel for The New Yorker; original image by Bachrach Photography
Laura Delano recognized that she was “excellent at everything, but it didn’t mean anything,” her doctor wrote. She grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest communities in the country. Her father is related to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and her mother was introduced to society at a débutante ball at the Waldorf-Astoria. In eighth grade, in 1996, Laura was the class president—she ran on a platform of planting daffodils on the school’s grounds—and among the best squash players in the country. She was one of those rare proportional adolescents with a thriving social life. But she doubted whether she had a “real self underneath.”
The oldest of three sisters, Laura felt as if she were living two separate lives, one onstage and the other in the audience, reacting to an exhausting performance. She snapped at her mother, locked herself in her room, and talked about wanting to die. She had friends at school who cut themselves with razors, and she was intrigued by what seemed to be an act of defiance. She tried it, too. “The pain felt so real and raw and mine,” she said.
Her parents took her to a family therapist, who, after several months, referred her to a psychiatrist. Laura was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and prescribed Depakote, a mood stabilizer that, the previous year, had been approved for treating bipolar patients. She hid the pills in a jewelry box in her closet and then washed them down the sink.
She hoped that she might discover a more authentic version of herself at Harvard, where she arrived as a freshman in 2001. Her roommate, Bree Tse, said, “Laura just blew me away—she was this golden girl, so vibrant and attentive and in tune with people.” On her first day at Harvard, Laura wandered the campus and thought, This is everything I’ve been working for. I’m finally here.
She tried out new identities. Sometimes she fashioned herself as a “fun, down-to-earth girl” who drank until early morning with boys who considered her chill. Other times, she was a postmodern nihilist, deconstructing the arbitrariness of language. “I remember talking with her a lot about surfaces,” a classmate, Patrick Bensen, said. “That was a recurring theme: whether the surface of people can ever harmonize with what’s inside their minds.”
During her winter break, she spent a week in Manhattan preparing for two débutante balls, at the Waldorf-Astoria and at the Plaza Hotel. She went to a bridal store and chose a floor-length strapless white gown and white satin gloves that reached above her elbows. Her sister Nina said that, at the Waldorf ball, “I remember thinking Laura was so much a part of it.”
Yet, in pictures before the second ball, Laura is slightly hunched over, as if trying to minimize the breadth of her muscular shoulders. She wears a thin pearl necklace, and her blond hair is coiled in an ornate bun. Her smile is pinched and dutiful. That night, before walking onstage, Laura did cocaine and chugged champagne. By the end of the party, she was sobbing so hard that the escort she’d invited to the ball had to put her in a cab. In the morning, she told her family that she didn’t want to be alive. She took literally the symbolism of the parties, meant to mark her entry into adulthood. “I didn’t know who I was,” she said. “I was trapped in the life of a stranger.”
Before Laura returned to Harvard, her doctor in Greenwich referred her to a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Massachusetts. One of the oldest hospitals in New England, McLean has treated a succession of celebrity patients, including Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Sylvia Plath, who described it as “the best mental hospital in the US.” Laura’s psychiatrist had Ivy League degrees, and she felt grateful to have his attention. In his notes, he described her as an “engaging, outgoing, and intelligent young woman,” who “grew up with high expectations for social conformity.” She told him, “I lie in my bed for hours at a time staring at the wall and wishing so much that I could be ‘normal.’ ”
The psychiatrist confirmed her early diagnosis, proposing that she had bipolar II, a less severe form of the disorder. Laura was relieved to hear the doctor say that her distress stemmed from an illness. “It was like being told, It’s not your fault. You are not lazy. You are not irresponsible.” After she left the appointment, she felt joyful. “The psychiatrist told me who I was in a way that felt more concrete than I’d ever conceptualized before,” she said. “It was as though he could read my mind, as though I didn’t need to explain anything to him, because he already knew what I was going to say. I had bipolar disorder. I’d had it all along.” She called her father, crying. “I have good news,” she said. “He’s figured out the problem.”
She began taking twenty milligrams of Prozac, an antidepressant; when she still didn’t feel better, her dose was increased to forty milligrams, and then to sixty. With each raised dose, she felt thankful to have been heard. “It was a way for me to mark to the world: this is how much pain I am in,” she said. Laura wasn’t sure whether Prozac actually lifted her mood—roughly a third of patients who take antidepressants do not respond to them—but her emotions felt less urgent and distracting, and her classwork improved. “I remember her carrying around this plastic pillbox with compartments for all the days of the week,” a friend from high school said. “It was part of this mysterious world of her psychiatric state.”
At parties, she flirted intently, but by the time she and a partner were together in bed, she said, “I’d kind of get hit with this realization that I was physically disconnected. And then I’d feel taken advantage of, and I would kind of flip out and start crying, and the guy would be, like, ‘What the heck is going on?’ ” Most antidepressants dampen sexuality—up to seventy per cent of people who take the medications report this response—but Laura was ashamed to talk about the problem with her psychiatrist. “I assumed he’d see sexuality as a luxury,” she said. “He’d be, like, ‘Really? You have this serious illness, and you’re worried about that?’ ”
During her junior year, her pharmacologist raised her Prozac prescription to eighty milligrams, the maximum recommended dose. The Prozac made her drowsy, so he prescribed two hundred milligrams of Provigil, a drug for narcolepsy that is often taken by soldiers and truck drivers to stay awake during overnight shifts. The Provigil gave her so much energy that, she said, “I was just a machine.” She was on the varsity squash team and played the best squash of her life. She was so alert that she felt as if she could “figure people out,” unpacking the details of their identities: she imagined that she could peer into their childhoods and see how their parents had raised them.
The Provigil made it hard for Laura to sleep, so her pharmacologist prescribed Ambien, which she took every night. In the course of a year, her doctors had created what’s known as “a prescription cascade”: the side effects of one medication are diagnosed as symptoms of another condition, leading to a succession of new prescriptions. Her energy levels rose and fell so quickly that she was told she had a version of bipolar disorder called “rapid cycling,” a term that describes people who have four or more manic episodes in a year, but is also applied, more loosely, to people who shift dramatically between moods. Sometimes Laura thought, Women who are happy and socialize like to buy dresses. She’d go to Nordstrom and buy two or three dresses. She recognized that this behavior was “textbook”—she had bought her own copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—but the awareness didn’t prevent the purchases.
Laura felt that the pressures of her junior year were paralyzing, so she did not return for the spring semester. That summer, she kept a journal in which she outlined her personal goals: “overanalysis must go”; “stop molding myself to the ideal person for my surroundings”; “find some faith in something, in anything.” But the idea of returning to Harvard that fall made her so distressed that she thought every day about dying. She took the semester off, and, at her request, her parents drove her to a hospital in Westchester County, New York. A psychiatrist there wrote that she “presents with inability to function academically.” At the hospital, where she stayed for two weeks, she was put on a new combination of pills: Lamictal, a mood stabilizer; Lexapro, an antidepressant; and Seroquel, an antipsychotic that she was told to use as a sleep aid. Her father, Lyman, said, “I had no conviction that the drugs were helping. Or that they weren’t helping.”
Laura returned to Harvard and managed to graduate, an achievement she chalked up to muscle memory; she was the kind of student who could regurgitate information without absorbing it. Then she held a series of jobs—working as an assistant for a professor and for a state agency that issued building permits—that she didn’t believe would lead to a career. She experienced what John Teasdale, a research psychologist at the University of Oxford, named “depression about depression.” She interpreted each moment of lethargy or disappointment as the start of a black mood that would never end. Psychiatric diagnoses can ensnare people in circular explanations: they are depressed because they are depressed.
Over the next four years, her doctors tripled her antidepressant dosage. Her dosage of Lamictal quadrupled. She also began taking Klonopin, which is a benzodiazepine, a class of drugs that has sedative effects. “What I heard a lot was that I was ‘treatment-resistant,’ ” she said. “Something in me was so strong and so powerful that even these sophisticated medications couldn’t make it better.”
For a brief period, Laura saw a psychiatrist who was also a psychoanalyst, and he questioned the way that she’d framed her illness. He doubted her early bipolar diagnosis, writing that “many depressions are given a ‘medical’ name by a psychiatrist, ascribing the problem to ‘chemistry’ and neglecting the context and specificity of why someone is having those particular life problems at that particular time.” He reminded her, “You described hating becoming a woman.” Laura decided that “he wasn’t legit.” She stopped going to her appointments.
She rarely saw friends from high school or college. “At a certain point, it was just, Oh, my God, Laura Delano—she’s ill,” the friend from high school said. “She seemed really anesthetized.” Laura had gained nearly forty pounds since freshman year, which she attributes partly to the medications. When she looked in the mirror, she felt little connection to her reflection. “All I ever want to do is lie in my bed, cuddle with my dog, and read books from writers whose minds I can relate to,” she wrote to a psychiatrist. “That’s all I ever want to do.” She identified intensely with Plath, another brilliant, privileged, charismatic young woman who, in her journal, accuses herself of being just another “selfish, egocentric, jealous and unimaginative female.” Laura said that, when she read Plath’s work, she “felt known for the first time.”
Laura found a psychiatrist she admired, whom I’ll call Dr. Roth. At appointments, Laura would enter a mode in which she could recount her psychic conflicts in a cool, clinical tone, taking pride in her psychiatric literacy. She saw her drugs as precision instruments that could eliminate her suffering, as soon as she and Dr. Roth found the right combination. “I medicated myself as though I were a finely calibrated machine, the most delicate error potentially throwing me off,” she later wrote. If she had coffee with someone and became too excited and talkative, she thought, Oh, my God, I might be hypomanic right now. If she woke up with racing thoughts, she thought, My symptoms of anxiety are ramping up. I should watch out for this. If they last more than a day or two, Dr. Roth may have to increase my meds.
The day before Thanksgiving, 2008, Laura drove to the southern coast of Maine, to a house owned by her late grandparents. Her extended family was there to celebrate the holiday. She noticed relatives tensing their shoulders when they talked to her. “She seemed muted and tucked away,” her cousin Anna said. When Laura walked through the house and the old wooden floorboards creaked beneath her feet, she felt ashamed to be carrying so much weight.
On her third day there, her parents took her into the living room, closed the doors, and told her that she seemed trapped. They were both crying. Laura sat on a sofa with a view of the ocean and nodded, but she wasn’t listening. “The first thing that came into my mind was: You’ve put everyone through enough.”
She went to her bedroom and poured eighty milligrams of Klonopin, eight hundred milligrams of Lexapro, and six thousand milligrams of Lamictal into a mitten. Then she sneaked into the pantry and grabbed a bottle of Merlot and put the wine, along with her laptop, into a backpack. Her sisters and cousins were getting ready to go to a Bikram-yoga class. Her youngest sister, Chase, asked her to join them, but Laura said she was going outside to write. “She looked so dead in her eyes,” Chase said. “There was no expression. There was nothing there, really.”
There were two trails to the ocean, one leading to a sandy cove and the other to the rocky coast, where Laura and her sisters used to fish for striped bass. Laura took the path to the rocks, passing a large boulder that her sister Nina, a geology major in college, had written her thesis about. The tide was low, and it was cold and windy. Laura leaned against a rock, took out her laptop, and began typing. “I will not try to make this poetic, for it shouldn’t be,” she wrote. “It is embarrassingly cliché to assume that one should write a letter to her loved ones upon ending her life.”
She swallowed a handful of pills at a time, washing them down with red wine. She found it increasingly hard to sit upright, and her vision began to narrow. As she lost consciousness, she thought, This is the most peaceful experience I’ve ever had. She felt grateful to be ending her life in such a beautiful place. She fell over and hit her head on a rock. She heard the sound but felt no pain.
When Laura hadn’t returned by dusk, her father walked along the shoreline with a flashlight until he saw her open laptop on a rock. Laura was airlifted to Massachusetts General Hospital, but the doctors said they weren’t sure that she would ever regain consciousness. She was hypothermic, her body temperature having fallen to nearly ninety-four degrees.
After two days in a medically induced coma, she woke up in the intensive-care unit. Her sisters and parents watched as she opened her eyes. Chase said, “She looked at all of us and processed that we were all there, that she was still alive, and she started sobbing. She said, ‘Why am I still here?’ ”
After a few days, Laura was transported to McLean Hospital, where she’d been elated to arrive seven years earlier. Now she was weak, dizzy, sweating profusely, and anemic. Her body ached from a condition called rhabdomyolysis, which results from the release of skeletal-muscle fibres into the bloodstream. She had a black eye from hitting the rock. Nevertheless, within a few days she returned to the mode she adopted among doctors. “Her eye contact and social comportment were intact,” a doctor wrote. Although she was still disappointed that her suicide hadn’t worked, she felt guilty for worrying her family. She reported having a “need to follow rules,” a doctor wrote. Another doctor noted that she did not seem to meet the criteria for major depression, despite her attempted suicide. The doctor proposed that she had borderline personality disorder, a condition marked by unstable relationships and self-image and a chronic sense of emptiness. According to her medical records, Laura agreed. “Maybe I’m borderline,” she said.
She was started on a new combination of medications: lithium, to stabilize her moods, and Ativan, a benzodiazepine, in addition to the antipsychotic Seroquel, which she had already been taking. Later, a second antipsychotic, Abilify, was added—common practice, though there was limited research justifying the use of antipsychotics in combination. “It is tempting to add a second drug just for the sake of ‘doing something,’ ” a 2004 paper in Current Medicinal Chemistry warns.
Shortly before Laura was discharged, she drafted a letter to the staff on her unit. “I truly don’t know where to begin in putting in words the appreciation I feel for what you’ve all done to help me,” she wrote. “It’s been so many years since I’ve felt the positive emotions—hope, mostly—that have flooded over me.” Unpersuaded by her own sentiment, she stopped the letter midsentence and never sent it.
Laura moved back home to live with her parents in Greenwich and spent her nights drinking with old friends. She told her psychiatrist, “I don’t feel grounded. . . . I am floating.” Her father encouraged her to “try to reach for one little tiny positive thought, so you can get a little bit of relief.” When she couldn’t arrive at one, he urged her, “Just think of Bitsy,” their cairn terrier.
When it was clear that positivity was out of reach, Laura began seeing a new psychiatrist at McLean, who embraced the theory that her underlying problem was borderline personality disorder. “It is unclear whether she has bipolar (as diagnosed in the past),” he wrote.
The concept of a borderline personality emerged in medical literature in the nineteen-thirties, encompassing patients who didn’t fit into established illness categories. Describing a borderline woman, the psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, a colleague of Freud’s, said, “It is like the performance of an actor who is technically well trained but who lacks the necessary spark to make his impersonations true to life.” In 1980, the diagnosis was added to the DSM, which noted that “the disorder is more commonly diagnosed in women.” One of its defining features is a formless, shifting sense of self. An editorial in Lancet Psychiatry this year proposed that “borderline personality disorder is not so much a diagnosis as it is a liminal state.”
In 2010, Laura moved in with her aunt Sara, who lived outside Boston, and attended a day-treatment program for borderline patients. “It was another offering of what could fix me, and I hadn’t tried it,” she said. At her intake interview, she wore stretchy black yoga pants from the Gap, one of the few garments that allowed her to feel invisible. She said that the director of the program told her, “So, you went to Harvard. I bet you didn’t think you’d end up at a place like this.” Laura immediately started crying, though she knew that her response would be interpreted as “emotional lability,” a symptom of the disorder.
Laura had been content to be bipolar. “I fit into the DSM criteria perfectly,” she said. But borderline personality disorder didn’t feel blameless to her. Almost all the patients in Laura’s group were women, and many had histories of sexual trauma or were in destructive relationships. Laura said that she interpreted the diagnosis as her doctors saying, “You are a slutty, manipulative, fucked-up person.”
Laura sometimes drank heavily, and, at the suggestion of a friend, she had begun attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Laura was heartened by the stories of broken people who had somehow survived. The meetings lacked the self-absorption, the constant turning inward, that she felt at the clinic, where she attended therapy every day. When Laura’s pharmacologist prescribed her Naltrexone—a drug that is supposed to block the craving for alcohol—Laura was insulted. If she were to quit drinking, she wanted to feel that she had done it on her own. She was already taking Effexor (an antidepressant), Lamictal, Seroquel, Abilify, Ativan, lithium, and Synthroid, a medication to treat hypothyroidism, a side effect of lithium. The medications made her so sedated that she sometimes slept fourteen hours a night. When she slept through a therapy appointment, her therapist called the police to check on her at her aunt’s house. “That really jolted something in me,” Laura said.
In May, 2010, a few months after entering the borderline clinic, she wandered into a bookstore, though she rarely read anymore. On the table of new releases was “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” by Robert Whitaker, whose cover had a drawing of a person’s head labelled with the names of several medications that she’d taken. The book tries to make sense of the fact that, as psychopharmacology has become more sophisticated and accessible, the number of Americans disabled by mental illness has risen. Whitaker argues that psychiatric medications, taken in heavy doses over the course of a lifetime, may be turning some episodic disorders into chronic disabilities. (The book has been praised for presenting a hypothesis of potential importance, and criticized for overstating evidence and adopting a crusading tone.)
Laura wrote Whitaker an e-mail with the subject line “Psychopharms and Selfhood,” and listed the many drugs she had taken. “I grew up in a suburban town that emphasized the belief that happiness comes from looking perfect to others,” she wrote. Whitaker lived in Boston, and they met for coffee. Whitaker told me that Laura reminded him of many young people who had contacted him after reading the book. He said, “They’d been prescribed one drug, and then a second, and a third, and they are put on this other trajectory where their self-identity changes from being normal to abnormal—they are told that, basically, there is something wrong with their brain, and it isn’t temporary—and it changes their sense of resilience and the way they present themselves to others.”
At her appointments with her pharmacologist, Laura began to raise the idea of coming off her drugs. She had used nineteen medications in fourteen years, and she wasn’t feeling better. “I never had a baseline sense of myself, of who I am, of what my capacities are,” she said. The doctors at the borderline clinic initially resisted her requests, but they also seemed to recognize that her struggles transcended brain chemistry. A few months earlier, one doctor had written on a prescription pad, “Practice Self-Compassion,” and for the number of refills he’d written, “Infinite.”
Following her pharmacologist’s advice, Laura first stopped Ativan, the benzodiazepine. A few weeks later, she went off Abilify, the antipsychotic. She began sweating so much that she could wear only black. If she turned her head quickly, she felt woozy. Her body ached, and occasionally she was overwhelmed by waves of nausea. Cystic acne broke out on her face and her neck. Her skin pulsed with a strange kind of energy. “I never felt quiet in my body,” she said. “It felt like there was a current of some kind under my skin, and I was trapped inside this encasing that was constantly buzzing.”
A month later, she went off Effexor, the antidepressant. Her fear of people judging her circled her head in permutations that became increasingly invasive. When a cashier at the grocery store spoke to her, she was convinced that he was only pretending to be cordial—that what he really wanted to say was “You are a repulsive, disgusting, pathetic human.” She was overstimulated by the colors of the cereal boxes in the store and by the grating sounds of people talking and moving. “I felt as if I couldn’t protect myself from all this life lived around me,” she said.
She began to experience emotion that was out of context—it felt simultaneously all-consuming and artificial. “The emotions were occupying me and, on one level, I knew they were not me, but I felt possessed by them,” she said. Later, she found a community of people online who were struggling to withdraw from psychiatric medications. They’d invented a word to describe her experience: “neuro-emotion,” an exaggerated feeling not grounded in reality. The Web forum Surviving Antidepressants, which is visited by thousands of people every week, lists the many varieties of neuro-emotion: neuro-fear, neuro-anger, neuro-guilt, neuro-shame, neuro-regret. Another word that members used was “dystalgia,” a wash of despair that one’s life has been futile.
When on the drugs, Laura said, “I never had a baseline sense of myself.”
Photograph by Levi Mandel for The New Yorker
For many people on the forum, it was impossible to put the experience into words. “The effects of these drugs come so close to your basic ‘poles of being’ that it’s really hard to describe them in any kind of reliable way,” one person wrote. Another wrote, “This withdrawal process has slowly been stripping me of everything I believed about myself and life. One by one, parts of ‘me’ have been falling away, leaving me completely empty of any sense of being someone.”
It took Laura five months to withdraw from five drugs, a process that coincided with a burgeoning doubt about a diagnosis that had become a kind of career. When she’d experienced symptoms of depression or hypomania, she had known what to do with them: she’d remember the details and tell her psychiatrist. Now she didn’t have language to mark her experiences. She spent hours alone, watching “South Park” or doing jigsaw puzzles. When her aunt Sara updated the rest of the family about Laura, the news was the same: they joked that she had become part of the couch. Her family, Laura said, learned to vacuum around her. Had she come from a less well-off and generous family, she’s not sure she would have been able to go off her medications. Others in her situation might have lost their job and, without income, ended up homeless. It took six months before she felt capable of working part time.
Laura had always assumed that depression was caused by a precisely defined chemical imbalance, which her medications were designed to recalibrate. She began reading about the history of psychiatry and realized that this theory, promoted heavily by pharmaceutical companies, is not clearly supported by evidence. Genetics plays a role in mental disorder, as do environmental influences, but the drugs do not have the specificity to target the causes of an illness. Wayne Goodman, a former chair of the F.D.A.’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, has called the idea that pills fix chemical imbalances a “useful metaphor” that he would never use with his patients. Ronald Pies, a former editor of Psychiatric Times, has said, “My impression is that most psychiatrists who use this expression”—that the pills fix chemical imbalances—“feel uncomfortable and a little embarrassed when they do so. It’s kind of a bumper-sticker phrase that saves time.”
Dorian Deshauer, a psychiatrist and historian at the University of Toronto, has written that the chemical-imbalance theory, popularized in the eighties and nineties, “created the perception that the long term, even life-long use of psychiatric drugs made sense as a logical step.” But psychiatric drugs are brought to market in clinical trials that typically last less than twelve weeks. Few studies follow patients who take the medications for more than a year. Allen Frances, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke, who chaired the task force for the fourth edition of the DSM, in 1994, told me that the field has neglected questions about how to take patients off drugs—a practice known as “de-prescribing.” He said that “de-prescribing requires a great deal more skill, time, commitment, and knowledge of the patient than prescribing does.” He emphasizes what he called a “cruel paradox: there’s a large population on the severe end of the spectrum who really need the medicine” and either don’t have access to treatment or avoid it because it is stigmatized in their community. At the same time, many others are “being overprescribed and then stay on the medications for years.” There are almost no studies on how or when to go off psychiatric medications, a situation that has created what he calls a “national public-health experiment.”
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The New Yorker April 1, 2019 ‘The Challenge of Going Off Psychiatric Drugs’ Https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-challenge-of-going-off-psychiatric-drugs…
Millions of Americans have taken antidepressants for many years. What happens when it’s time to stop? Diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager, Laura Delano was prescribed nineteen medications in fourteen years. You need to enable JavaScript to run this app…0:00 / 1:04:32 Audio: Listen to this article…To hear more, download the Audm iPhone app.
MANIC DEPRESSIVE DEFINED – No Pharma before IN THE DAY!
Request From Quora…https://www.quora.com/Which-famous-people-throughout-history-probably
manic depressive
TOP: Beethoven
BOTTOM: Schumann
If not the tone of sounds but the tone of colors intrigues you, then the most quintessential example would be that of Vincent Van Gogh who completed the most famous of his works in the last two years of his life. He died at the age of 37 after a period in which he “had fits of despair and hallucination during which he could not work, and in between them, long clear months in which he could and did, punctuated by extreme visionary ecstasy”. According to many sources, even the genius Picasso showed symptoms of the disorder.
TOP: Vincent Van Gogh
BOTTOM: Weeping Woman, Pablo Picasso
Joining Sylvia Plath in the club of literary figures with mood swings of the bipolar type are Virginia Woolf (suffered a troubled childhood with death of mother, followed by recurring breakdowns, father’s death, sexual abuse), Mark Twain (felt guilty for a friend’s death for some parapsychological reasons, family troubles, in later life suffered from ‘bouts’ of depression, came with the Halley’s comet and went out with it after predicting the same, parapsychology?), and Edgar Allan Poe (who famously said “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence — whether much that is glorious — whether all that is profound — does not spring from disease of thought — from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect” ).
TOP TO BOTTOM : Mark Twain, the very beautiful Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe
Amongst political leaders, known for his all night writing and mood swings was Winston Churchill who had contemplated on suicide too (“I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express tra… (more)
David McKerracher, Psychology fascinates me.
After reading Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” biography, it sure seems as though Steve is an excellent candidate.
A few websites posit the same hypothesis. For instance, Bipolar Disorder – “The CEO Disease”I am in no way saying that bipolar is a good thing. My worst life experiences have been due to it. It does seem, however, that in some cases there are ways of using it to one’s advantage.
Nietzsche also fits the bill.
I would say he was probably battling depression with his manic writing. He wrote one book every year for ten years. He wrote five books in the last year before his collapse. Every one of those books is brilliant. He was a manic genius until his collapse, and of course he collapsed after writing 5 books in one year!
http://www.bipolarworld.net/Bipolar%20Disorder/Articles/art14.htm John James Morton, Unlike history, I try not to repeat myself.
William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, one of the leading British statesmen of the 18th century, seems likely to have been manic-depressive. Even at the height of his power he would become unavailable, sometimes for long periods, in a manner which bewildered his colleagues. As the historian J.H. Plumb put it:
“There were moments when he felt like God, and others when he was so wretched that he could not bear to hear or see a human being.” [The First Four Georges, ch. III]
Eric Griffiths, Tormented observer of myself….Written Mar 25, 2013
Far too many to list here; q.v.:
2 List of people with bipolar disorder
3 Famous People with Bipolar Disorder
Famous People with Bipolar Disorder
Much of this list was obtained from the Internet.
POLITICAL…
Robert Boorstin, special assistant to President Clinton
L. Brent Bozell, political scientist, attorney, writer
Bob Bullock, ex secretary of state, state comptroller and lieutenant governer
Winston Churchill
Kitty Dukasis, former First Lady of Massachusetts
Thomas Eagleton, lawyer, former U.S. Senator
Lynne Rivers, U.S. Congress
Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States
Actors & Actresses
Ned Beatty
Maurice Bernard, soap opera
Jeremy Brett
Jim Carey
Lisa Nicole Carson
Rosemary Clooney, singer
Lindsay Crosby
Eric Douglas
Robert Downey Jr.
Patty Duke
Carrie Fisher
Connie Francis, singer and actress
Shecky Greene, comedian
Linda Hamilton
Moss Hart, actor, director, playright
Mariette Hartley
Margot Kidder
Vivien Leigh
Kevin McDonald, comedian
Kristy McNichols
Burgess Meredith, actor, director
Spike Milligan, actor, writer
Spike Mulligan, comic actor and writer
Nicola Pagett
Ben Stiller, actor, director, writer
David Strickland
Lili Taylor
Tracy Ullman
Jean-Claude Van Damme
Robin Williams
Jonathon Winters, comedian
Artists
Alvin Alley, dancer, choreogapher
Ludwig Von Beethoven
Tim Burton, artist, director
Francis Ford Coppola, director
George Fredrick Handel, composer
Bill Lichtenstein, producer
Joshua Logan, broadway director, producer
Vincent Van Gogh, painter
Gustav Mahier, composer
Francesco Scavullo, artist, photographer
Robert Schumann, composer
Don Simpson, movie producer
Norman Wexler, screenwriter, playwright
Entrepreneurs
Robert Campeau
Pierre Peladeau
Heinz C. Prechter
Ted Turner, media giant
Financiers
John Mulheren
Murray Pezim
Miscellaneous
Buzz Aldrin, astronaut
Clifford Beers, humanitarian
Garnet Coleman, legislator (Texas)
Larry Flynt, publisher and activist
Kit Gingrich, Newt’s mom
Phil Graham, owner of Washington Post
Peter Gregg, team owner and manager, race car driver
Susan Panico (Susan Dime-Meenan), business executive
Sol Wachtier, former New York State Chief Judge
MUSICIANS
Ludwig van Beethoven, composer
Alohe Jean Burke, musician, vocalist
Rosemary Clooney, singer
DMX Earl Simmons, rapper and actor
Ray Davies
Lenny Dee
Gaetano Donizetti, opera singer
Peter Gabriel
Jimi Hendrix
Kristen Hersh (Throwing Muses)
Phyllis Hyman
Jack Irons
Daniel Johnston
Otto Klemperer, musician, conductor
Oscar Levant, pianist, composer, television
Phil Ochs, musician, political activist, poet
John Ogden, composer, musician
Jaco Pastorius
Charley Pride
Mac Rebennack (Dr. John)
Jeannie C. Riley
Alys Robi, vocalist in Canada
Axl Rose
Nick Traina
Del Shannon
Phil Spector, musician and producer
Sting, Gordon Sumner, musician, composer
Tom Waits, musician, composer
Brian Wilson, musician, composer, arranger
Townes Van Zandt, musician, composer
POETS…
John Berryman
C.E. Chaffin, writer, poet
Hart Crane
Randall Jarrell
Jane Kenyon
Robert Lowell
Sylvia Plath
Robert Schumann
Delmore Schwartz
Scholars
John Strugnell, biblical scholar
Scientists
Karl Paul Link, chemist
Dimitri Mihalas
Sports
Shelley Beattie, bodybuilding, sailing
John Daly, golf
Muffin Spencer-Devlin, pro golf
Ilie Nastase, tennis
Jimmy Piersail, baseball player, Boston Red Sox, sports announcer
Barret Robbins, football
Wyatt Sexton, football
Alonzo Spellman, football
Darryl Strawberry, baseball
Dimitrius Underwood, football
Luther Wright, basketball
Bert Yancey, athlete
TV & Radio
Dick Cavett
Jay Marvin, radio, writer
Jane Pauley
Writers
Louis Althusser, philosopher, writer
Honors de Balzac
Art Buchwald, writer, humorist
Neal Cassady
Patricia Cornwell
Margot Early
Kaye Gibbons
Johann Goethe
Graham Greene
Abbie Hoffman, writer, political activist
Kay Redfield Jamison, writer, psychologist
Peter Nolan Lawrence
Frances Lear, writer, editor, women’s rights activist
Rika Lesser, writer, translator
Kate Millet
Robert Munsch
Margo Orum
Edgar Allen Poe
Theodore Roethke
Lori Schiller, writer, educator
Frances Sherwood
Scott Simmie, writer, journalist
August Strindberg
Mark Twain
Joseph Vasquez, writer, movie director
Mark Vonnegut, doctor, writer
Sol Wachtler, writer, judge
Mary Jane Ward
Virginia Woolf
4 Famous People With Bipolar Disorder: “Bipolar“…(We are all Bipolar!) a non-diagnosis…likely
5 Famous people with bipolar disorder
6 http://www.everydayhealth.com/bi…
2.2k Views · View Upvotes · Answer requested by David McKerracher
http://www.bipolarworld.net/Bipolar%20Disorder/Articles/art14.htm
Hunter McCord, works at Avago Technologies
Apparently, Vincent Van Gogh had manic depression/bipolar disorder
Famous People with Bipolar Disorder (4 pages) including 75 pictures and a short bio of each. Some of the older ones are only assumed to be bipolar, by their behavior. (out of curiosity I looked at the months each person in my sample was born – out of 71 with months November had 13, October had 12, Jan, Feb, Mar, May & Sept each had 5, July, Aug, and Dec each had 4, and April had 3)
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564
He was a Renaissance painter, sculptor, poet and architect. He is famous for creating the fresco ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, one of the most stupendous works in all of Western art, as well as the Last Judgment over the altar, and “The Martyrdom of St. Peter and “The Conversion of St. Paul in the Vatican’s Cappella Paolina.
Among his many sculptures are those of the Pieta and David, again, sublime masterpieces of their field, as well as the Virgin, Bacchus, Moses, Rachel, Leah, and members of the Medici family…
Mary Wollstonecraft
(April 27, 1759 – September 10, 1797
Mary was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Her husband William Godwin was one of the most prominent atheists of his day, and a forefather of the anarchist movement..
In 1778, when she was nineteen, Mary Wollstonecraft left home to take a situation as a companion with a rich tradesman’s widow at Bath. After two years she returned home to nurse her sick mother, who died after long suffering, wholly dependent on her daughter Mary’s constant care. The mother’s last words were often quoted by Mary Wollstonecraft in her own last years of distress-“A little patience, and all will be over.”
Then she went up the river to drown herself. She paced the road at Putney on an October night, in 1795, in heavy rain, until her clothes were drenched, that she might sink more surely, and then threw herself from the top of Putney Bridge, leaving a note for Imlay; “Let my wrongs sleep with me”.
She was rescued and lived on with deadened spirit. She had lost everything except her child; her faith in revolution, in the virtue of the people and in the possibilities of an independent woman’s life Early in 1797 she was married to William Godwin, a philosopher who was notorious for his rejection of romance and marriage.
On September 10, 1797, at the age of thirty-eight, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin succumbed to puerperal fever after the birth of her daughter. Having survived so many difficult situations, she died when she had so much to live for.
She is rightly remembered as one of the founders of modern feminist…
Ludwig van Beethoven
baptized December 17, 1770 – March 26, 1827
Beethoven was a German composer, the predominant musical figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest of composers
Beethoven’s career as a composer is usually divided into Early, Middle, and Late periods.
In the Early period, he is seen as emulating his great predecessors Haydn and Mozart at the same time exploring new directions and gradually expanding the scope and ambition of his work
The Middle period began shortly after Beethoven’s personal crisis centering around deafness, and is noted for large-scale works expressing heroism and struggle; these include many of the most famous works of classical music
Beethoven’s Late period began around 1816 and lasted until Beethoven ceased to compose in 1826. The late works are greatly admired for their intellectual depth and their intense, highly personal expression.
Beethoven’s personal life was troubled. Around age 28 he started to become deaf, a calamity which led him for some time to contemplate suicide He was attracted to unattainable (married or aristocratic) women, whom he idealized; he never married. A period of low productivity around 1812 -1816 is thought by some scholars to have been the result of depression Beethoven quarreled, often bitterly, with his relatives and others, and frequently behaved badly to other people. He moved often from dwelling to dwelling, and had strange personal habits such as wearing filthy clothing while washing compulsively. He often had financial troubles.
It is common for listeners to perceive an echo of Beethoven’s life in his music, which often depicts struggle followed by triumph; this description is often applied to Beethoven’s creation of masterpieces in the face of his severe personal difficulties.
Beethoven’s health had always been bad, and it failed entirely in 1826. His death in the following year is usually attributed to liver disease
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
October 21, 1772 -July 25, 1834
Coleridge was an English poet, critic, and philosopher and, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and as one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
In 1800 he returned to England and shortly thereafter settled with his family and friends at Keswick in the Lake District of Cumberland Soon, however, he fell into a vicious circle of lack of confidence in his poetic powers, ill-health, and increased opium dependency.
From 1804 to 1806, Coleridge lived in Malta and travelled in Sicily and Italy, and it was during this period that Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict, using the drug as a substitute for the lost vigour and creativity of his youth.
In 1816 Coleridge, his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took residence in the home of the physician James Gillman, in Highgate He died in Highgate on July, 1834
Meriwether Lewis
August 18, 1774 – October 11,1809
He was an American explorer, soldier, and public administrator; he is best known for his role as the leader of the Corps of Discovery.
Lewis was born in Albemarle County, Virginia (near Charlottesville) and moved with his family to when he was ten. At thirteen he was sent back to Virginia for education by private tutors.
He was shot at a tavern called Grinder’s Stand about 70 miles (110 km) from Nashville, Tennessee, on the Natchez Trace, while en route to Washington; his wrists had been cut, and he had been shot in the head and chest. Whether his death was from suicide (as is widely believed) or murder (as contended by his family) has never been conclusively determined; however, it should be noted that he allegedly attempted to jump into the Mississippi River and drown shortly before his death, and also was extremely
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, Lord Byron
January 22, 1788 – April 19, 1824
He was the most widely read English language poet of his day. His best-known works are the narrative poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The latter remained incomplete on his death.
Byron’s fame rests not only on his writings, but also on his life, which featured extravagant living, debts, separation, allegations of incest and his eventual death from fever after he traveled to fight on the Greek side in the Greek War of Independence’s theme
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
June 30, 1803 – January 26, 1849
He was an English poet and dramatist. He was son of Dr. Thomas Beddoes , a friend of Coleridge, and Anna, sister of Maria Edgeworth. In 1822 he wrote The Brides’ Tragedy, an blank verse drama that was published and well reviewed.
In 1824 he went to Göttingen to study medicine. He was expelled, and then went to Würzburg to complete his training. At this period he became involved with radical politics. He was deported from Bavaria in 1833, and had to leave Zürich, where he had settled, in 1840.
He continued to write, but published nothing. His play Death’s Jest-Book was published after his death by friends in 1850, and his Collected Poems in 1851.
PROBABLY MARTIN LUTHER…ANGIE CASE (GEORGE HINKLE’S GREAT GRANDMOTHER WHO WAS A SIGNIFICANT FOUNDER OF THE SCHOOLS & HIGHWAYS OF NORTH ARKANSAS WITH 10 CHILDREN (LIKELY INSECURELY ATTACHED) IT …MANIA IS NOT ALL BAD …
IT CAN BE “HOLY” DEPENDING ON DNA & LIVE FOOD DIET & CONNECTEDNESS TO GOD…
He led an itinerant life after leaving Switzerland, returning to England only in 1846, before going back to Germany. He became increasingly disturbed and committed suicide in 1849.
Hans Christian Andersen
April 2, 1805 – August 4, 1875
Hans Christian Anderson was a Danish author and poet famous for his fairy tales – one of the most well-known authors of fairy-tales. His works have been translated all over the world. He also wrote plays, novels, poems, travel books, and several autobiographies. Although many of his stories are upbeat and entertaining, there is an element of tragedy in many.
According to one writer, “It may also be noted that part of what makes some of the tales so compelling is Andersen’s identification with the unfortunate and the outcast. A strong autobiographical element runs through his sadder tales; throughout his life he perceived himself as an outsider, and, never satisfied that he was completely accepted, he suffered deeply in his closest personal relationships.” msthemee
Ralph Waldo Emerson
May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882
Emerson was a famous American essayist and one of America’s most influential thinkers and writers.
Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Unitarian minister and would later become a Unitarian minister himself. Emerson eventually, however, broke away from the doctrine of his superiors and formulated and expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay Nature.
After Emerson graduated from Harvard, he assisted his brother in a school for young ladies established in their mother’s house; when his brother went to Göttingen to study divinity, Emerson took charge of the school. Over the next several years, Emerson made his living as a schoolmaster, eventually studying divinity himself, and emerging as a Unitaritan minister. A dispute with church officials over the administration of the Communion service led to his resignation. About the same time, his young wife and one true love, Miss Elena Louisa Tucker, died in April of 1831.
In 1836, Emerson and other like-minded intellectuals founded The Dial, a periodical which served as a vehicle for the Transcendental movement, although the first issue did not appear until July of 1840. Meanwhile, Emerson published his first book, Nature, in September of 1836 …
Robert Alexander Schumann…
June 8, 1810 – July 29, 1856
Schumann was a German composer and pianist in the Romantic period of Classical music.
Probably no composer ever rivaled Schumann in concentrating his energies on one form of music at a time. At first all his creative impulses were translated into pianoforte music, then followed the miraculous year of the songs. In 1841 he wrote two of his four symphonies. The year 1842 was devoted to the composition of chamber music, and includes the pianoforte quintet (op. 44), now one of his best known and most admired works. In 1843 he wrote Paradise and the Pen, his first essay at concerted vocal music.
On the 27th of February, 1854 he threw himself into the Rhine. He was rescued by some boatmen, but when brought to land was determined to be quite insane. He suffered from syphilis, that had not been properly treated and that developed into its tertiary stage. He was taken to a private asylum in Endenich near Bonn, and remained there until his death on the 29th of July 1856. He was buried at Bonn, and in 1880 a statue by A. Donndorf was erected on his tomb.. He experienced periods of great productivity and creativity, while from the mid-1840s on he suffered periodic attacks of severe depression and nervous exhaustion, and contemplated or attempted suicide a number of
Florence Nightingale
May 12, 1820 – August 13, 1910
The Lady With The Lamp – was the pioneer of modern nursing Inspired by what she understood to be a divine calling (first experienced in 1837 at the age of 17 at Embley Park and later throughout her life), Nightingale made a commitment to nursing, a career with a poor reputation and filled mostly by poorer women
The world’s most famous nurse is believed to have suffered from a bipolar disorder, and she once said God had called her to her work and that she heard voices.
Nightingale suffered from a bipolar disorder that caused long periods of depression and remarkable bursts of productivity.
“Florence heard voices and experienced a number of severe depressive episodes in her teens and early 20s – symptoms consistent with the onset of bipolar disorder,” e
Charles Pierre Baudelaire
April 9, 1821-August 31, 1867)
He was one of the most influential French poets. He was also an important critic and translator Called ‘the father of modern criticism,’ who shocked his contemporaries with his visions of lust and decay. Baudelaire was the first to equate modern, artificial, and decadent. In Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863, The Painter of Modern Life) Baudelaire argued in favor of artificiality, stating that vice is natural in that it is selfish, while virtue is artificial because we must restrain our natural impulses in order to be good. The snobbish aesthete, the dandy was for Baudelaire the ultimate hero and the best proof of an absolutely purposeless existence. He is a gentleman who never becomes vulgar and always preserves the cool smile of the stoic
Baudelaire’s confrontation of depression with the consumption of drugs such as opium, hashish and alcohol was a major influence on his work. Many of his poems were influenced by his interest in “les correspondances”, or synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is the mixing of the senses, that is, the ability to smell colors or see sounds. He wrote several poems about the subject itself, such as “CorrespondenceS”, and used imagery and symbolism based on the experiences of synaesthesia. In general, Baudelaire was a sensualist, in love with sensations, and he tried to experience them and express them in abundance.
Baudelaire was affected by bipolar disorder, commonly known as manic depression. —
Leo Nikolayevitch Tolstoy
September 9 (August 28, O.S), 1828 – November 20 (November 7, O.S.), 1910
Tolstoy was a Russian novelist, reformer, and moral thinker, notable for his influence on Russian literature and politics. As a count, he was a member of the Tolstoy family of Russian nobility.
Tolstoy was one of the giants of 19th century Russian literature. His most famous works include the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and many shorter works, including the novellas The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Hadji Murad
Tolstoy’s private life is well known in Russia. He lived his entire life in Yasnaya Polyana. On September 23… the 34 year old Tolstoy married Sonya Andreyevna Behrs, a girl of 18. Their marriage has been described by A.N.Wilson as one of the unhappiest in literary history, and was marked from the outset by Tolstoy on the eve of his marriage giving his diaries of his bachelor escapades to Sonya, which he made her read. These detailed Tolstoy’s sexual relations with his serfs. He even admits to taking a young lady’s virtue, who was forever disgraced by the encounter (incredibly, he used this as the basis of Resurrection).
His relationship with his wife further deteriorated as his beliefs became increasingly radical. In one journal entry, she writes of him becoming increasingly suicidal, unable to reconcile his faith with the material world. Sonya bore him 13 children, 7 of whom survived to adulthood.
He died of pneumonia at Astapovo station on Nov.20,1910 after leaving home in the middle of winter at the age of 82.
Charles John Huffam Dickens
February 7, 1812 – June 9, 1870
Dickens, pen-name “Boz “, was an English novelist of the Victorian era. The popularity of his books/short stories during his lifetime and to the present is demonstrated by the fact that none of his novels have ever gone out of print
Dickens separated from his wife in 1858. In Victorian times divorce was almost unthinkable particularly for someone as famous as Charles Dickens and he continued to maintain her in a house for the next twenty years until she died. Although they were initially happy together, Catherine did not seem to share quite the same boundless energy for life which Dickens had. Her job of looking after their ten children and the pressure of living with and keeping house for a world famous novelist certainly did not help. Catherine’s sister Georgina moved in to help her but there were rumors that Charles was romantically linked to his sister-in-law. An indication of his marital dissatisfaction was when in 1855 he went to meet his first love Maria Beadnell. Maria was by this time married as well but she seems to have fallen short of Dickens’ romantic memory of her.
He was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb reads: “He was a sympathizer to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England’s greatest writers is lost to the world.”mstheme
Samuel Langhorne Clemens – Mark Twain November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910
Mark Twain was a famous and popular American humorist, writer and lecturer
At his peak, he was probably the most popular American celebrity of his time. William Faulkner wrote he was “the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.” His pseudonym was derived from the shout used to mark how deep the water was for river boats – “by the mark, twain” (in other words, mark two fathoms).
In his later life, Twain was a very depressed man, but still capable. Twain was able to respond “The report of my death is an exaggeration” in the New York Journal, June 2nd 1897. He lost 3 out of 4 of his children, and his beloved wife, Olivia Langdon, before his death in 1910. He also had some very bad times with his businesses. His publishing company ended up going bankrupt, and he lost thousands of dollars on one typesetting machine that was never finished. He also lost a great deal of revenue on royalties from his books being plagiarized before he even had a chance to publish them himself.
Twain himself died less than one year later. He wrote in 1909, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.” And so he did.
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TOP: Ecstasy, Władysław Podkowiński
BOTTOM: Sylvia Plath, aged 25
EXCERPT FROM THE POEM
“The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.”
Historical allusions, vivid imagery which is brimming with emotions, and a tinge of obscurity make it believable when a critic describes her poetry as “ecstatic, oracular poetic type, which centered upon self”. The poem culminates in the aforementioned lines which imply a wish to attain death, the suicidal leap into the sun. Probably, she finds such attainment ecstatic.
Sylvia Plath is known for her novel The Bell Jar in which she draws a lot from her personal experience of seeking institutionalized treatment for her mood disorder and suicidal tendencies. In her works, the chapters exhibit conspicuous contrasts as they switch tones from being full of hope in one to misery in another.
This is a crucial aspect which must be considered while answering this question. A lot of the figures in history are believed to have suffered from the manic-depressive disorder on the basis of it being evident in their work and their method of working. The mad geniuses, as per evidence, show some common traits of alternating periods of inactivity and hyperactivity. Take the case of Robert Schumann who would have periods of ‘intense creativity’ which were characterized by insomnia (another common trait) and completing excellent works within weeks. And so was the case of arguably the greatest composer, Beethoven who suffered from fits in which he could compose numerous works simultaneously although his most famous works were written during his down periods. Another great composer, Mozart is believed to suffer from a milder form of bipolar spectrum disorder. In addition to this, the work of Tchaikovsky also shows great variation of tone, tempo, and rhythm.
TOP: Beethoven
BOTTOM: Schumann
If not the tone of sounds but the tone of colors intrigues you, then the most quintessential example would be that of Vincent Van Gogh who completed the most famous of his works in the last two years of his life. He died at the age of 37 after a period in which he “had fits of despair and hallucination during which he could not work, and in between them, long clear months in which he could and did, punctuated by extreme visionary ecstasy”. According to many sources, even the genius Picasso showed symptoms of the disorder.
TOP: Vincent Van Gogh
BOTTOM: Weeping Woman, Pablo Picasso
Joining Sylvia Plath in the club of literary figures with mood swings of the bipolar type are Virginia Woolf (suffered a troubled childhood with death of mother, followed by recurring breakdowns, father’s death, sexual abuse), Mark Twain (felt guilty for a friend’s death for some parapsychological reasons, family troubles, in later life suffered from ‘bouts’ of depression, came with the Halley’s comet and went out with it after predicting the same, parapsychology?), and Edgar Allan Poe (who famously said “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence — whether much that is glorious — whether all that is profound — does not spring from disease of thought — from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect” ).
TOP TO BOTTOM: Mark Twain, the very beautiful Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe
Amongst political leaders, known for his all night writing and mood swings was Winston Churchill who had contemplated on suicide too (“I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express tra… (more)
David McKerracher, Psychology fascinates me.
After reading Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” biography, it sure seems as though Steve is an excellent candidate.
A few websites posit the same hypothesis. For instance, Bipolar Disorder – “The CEO Disease”
I am in no way saying that bipolar is a good thing. My worst life experiences have been due to it. It does seem, however, that in some cases there are ways of using it to one’s advantage.
Nietzsche also fits the bill.
I would say he was probably battling depression with his manic writing.
He wrote one book every year for ten years. He wrote five books in the last year before his collapse. Every one of those books is brilliant. He was a manic genius until his collapse, and of course, he collapsed after writing 5 books in one year!
http://www.bipolarworld.net/Bipolar%20Disorder/Articles/art14.htm
John James Morton, Unlike history, I try not to repeat myself.
William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, one of the leading British statesmen of the 18th century, seems likely to have been manic-depressive. Even at the height of his power he would become unavailable, sometimes for long periods, in a manner which bewildered his colleagues. As the historian J.H. Plumb put it:
“There were moments when he felt like God, and others when he was so wretched that he could not bear to hear or see a human being.” [The First Four Georges, ch. III]
2.3k Views · View Upvotes · Answer requested by David McKerracher
Eric Griffiths, Tormented observer of myself….Written Mar 25, 2013
Far too many to list here; q.v.:
2 List of people with bipolar disorder
3 Famous People with Bipolar Disorder
Famous People with Bipolar Disorder
Much of this list was obtained from the Internet.
Actors & Actresses
Ned Beatty
Maurice Bernard, soap opera
Jeremy Brett
Jim Carey
Lisa Nicole Carson
Rosemary Clooney, singer
Lindsay Crosby
Eric Douglas
Robert Downey Jr.
Patty Duke
Carrie Fisher
Connie Francis, singer and actress
Shecky Greene, comedian
Linda Hamilton
Moss Hart, actor, director, playwright
Mariette Hartley
Margot Kidder
Vivien Leigh
Kevin McDonald, comedian
Kristy McNichols
Burgess Meredith, actor, director
Spike Milligan, actor, writer
Spike Mulligan, comic actor and writer
Nicola Pagett
Ben Stiller, actor, director, writer
David Strickland
Lili Taylor
Tracy Ullman
Jean-Claude Van Damme
Robin Williams
Jonathon Winters, comedian
Artists
Alvin Alley, dancer, choreographer
Ludwig Von Beethoven
Tim Burton, artist, director
Francis Ford Coppola, director
George Fredrick Handel, composer
Bill Lichtenstein, producer
Joshua Logan, Broadway director, producer
Vincent Van Gogh, painter
Gustav Mahier, composer
Francesco Scavullo, artist, photographer
Robert Schumann, composer
Don Simpson, movie producer
Norman Wexler, screenwriter, playwright
Entrepreneurs
Robert Campeau
Pierre Peladeau
Heinz C. Prechter
Ted Turner, media giant
Financiers
John Mulheren
Murray Pezim
Miscellaneous
Buzz Aldrin, astronaut
Clifford Beers, humanitarian
Garnet Coleman, legislator (Texas)
Larry Flynt, publisher and activist
Kit Gingrich, Newt’s mom
Phil Graham, owner of Washington Post
Peter Gregg, team owner and manager, race car driver
Susan Panico (Susan Dime-Meenan), business executive
Sol Wachtier, former New York State Chief Judge
Musicians
Ludwig van Beethoven, composer
Alohe Jean Burke, musician, vocalist
Rosemary Clooney, singer
DMX Earl Simmons, rapper and actor
Ray Davies
Lenny Dee
Gaetano Donizetti, opera singer
Peter Gabriel
Jimi Hendrix
Kristen Hersh (Throwing Muses)
Phyllis Hyman
Jack Irons
Daniel Johnston
Otto Klemperer, musician, conductor
Oscar Levant, pianist, composer, television
Phil Ochs, musician, political activist, poet
John Ogden, composer, musician
Jaco Pastorius
Charley Pride
Mac Rebennack (Dr. John)
Jeannie C. Riley
Alys Robi, vocalist in Canada
Axl Rose
Nick Traina
Del Shannon
Phil Spector, musician and producer
Sting, Gordon Sumner, musician, composer
Tom Waits, musician, composer
Brian Wilson, musician, composer, arranger
Townes Van Zandt, musician, composer
Poets
John Berryman
C.E. Chaffin, writer, poet
Hart Crane
Randall Jarrell
Jane Kenyon
Robert Lowell
Sylvia Plath
Robert Schumann
Delmore Schwartz
Political
Robert Boorstin, special assistant to President Clinton
L. Brent Bozell, political scientist, attorney, writer
Bob Bullock, ex-secretary of state, state comptroller and lieutenant governor
Winston Churchill
Kitty Dukasis, former First Lady of Massachusetts
Thomas Eagleton, lawyer, former U.S. Senator
Lynne Rivers, U.S. Congress
Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States
Scholars
John Strugnell, biblical scholar
Scientists
Karl Paul Link, chemist
Dimitri Mihalas
Sports
Shelley Beattie, bodybuilding, sailing
John Daly, golf
Muffin Spencer-Devlin, pro golf
Ilie Nastase, tennis
Jimmy Piersail, baseball player, Boston Red Sox, sports announcer
Barret Robbins, football
Wyatt Sexton, football
Alonzo Spellman, football
Darryl Strawberry, baseball
Dimitrius Underwood, football
Luther Wright, basketball
Bert Yancey, athlete
TV & Radio
Dick Cavett
Jay Marvin, radio, writer
Jane Pauley
Writers
Louis Althusser, philosopher, writer
Honors de Balzac
Art Buchwald, writer, humorist
Neal Cassady
Patricia Cornwell
Margot Early
Kaye Gibbons
Johann Goethe
Graham Greene
Abbie Hoffman, writer, political activist
Kay Redfield Jamison, writer, psychologist
Peter Nolan Lawrence
Frances Lear, writer, editor, women’s rights activist
Rika Lesser, writer, translator
Kate Millet
Robert Munsch
Margo Orum
Edgar Allen Poe
Theodore Roethke
Lori Schiller, writer, educator
Frances Sherwood
Scott Simmie, writer, journalist
August Strindberg
Mark Twain
Joseph Vasquez, writer, movie director
Mark Vonnegut, doctor, writer
Sol Wachtler, writer, judge
Mary Jane Ward
Virginia Woolf
4 Famous People With Bipolar Disorder: “Bipolar“…(We are all Bipolar!) a non-diagnosis…likely
5 Famous people with bipolar disorder
6 http://www.everydayhealth.com/bi…
2.2k Views · View Upvotes · Answer requested by David McKerracher
http://www.bipolarworld.net/Bipolar%20Disorder/Articles/art14.htm
Hunter McCord, works at Avago Technologies
PROBABLY MARTIN LUTHER…ANGIE CASE (GEORGE HINKLE’S GREAT GRANDMOTHER WHO WAS A SIGNIFICANT FOUNDER OF THE SCHOOLS & HIGHWAYS OF NORTH ARKANSAS WITH 10 CHILDREN (LIKELY INSECURELY ATTACHED) IT …MANIA IS NOT ALL BAD …
IT CAN BE “HOLY” DEPENDING ON DNA & LIVE FOOD DIET & CONNECTEDNESS TO GOD..
He led an itinerant life after leaving Switzerland, returning to England only in 1846, before going back to Germany. He became increasingly disturbed, and committed suicide in 1849.
Hans Christian Andersen
April 2, 1805 – August 4, 1875
Hans Christian Anderson was a Danish author and poet famous for his fairy tales – one of the most well-known authors of fairy-tales. His works have been translated all over the world. He also wrote plays, novels, poems, travel books, and several autobiographies. Although many of his stories are upbeat and entertaining, there is an element of tragedy in many.
According to one writer, “It may also be noted that part of what makes some of the tales so compelling is Andersen’s identification with the unfortunate and the outcast. A strong autobiographical element runs through his sadder tales; throughout his life he perceived himself as an outsider, and, never satisfied that he was completely accepted, he suffered deeply in his closest personal relationships.” msthemee
Ralph Waldo Emerson
May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882
Emerson was a famous American essayist and one of America’s most influential thinkers and writers.
Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Unitarian minister and would later become a Unitarian minister himself. Emerson eventually, however, broke away from the doctrine of his superiors and formulated and expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay Nature.
After Emerson graduated from Harvard, he assisted his brother in a school for young ladies established in their mother’s house; when his brother went to Göttingen to study divinity, Emerson took charge of the school. Over the next several years, Emerson made his living as a schoolmaster, eventually studying divinity himself, and emerging as a Unitaritan minister. A dispute with church officials over the administration of the Communion service led to his resignation. About the same time, his young wife and one true love, Miss Elena Louisa Tucker, died in April of 1831.
In 1836, Emerson and other like-minded intellectuals founded The Dial, a periodical which served as a vehicle for the Transcendental movement, although the first issue did not appear until July of 1840. Meanwhile, Emerson published his first book, Nature, in September of 1836 …
Robert Alexander Schumann…
June 8, 1810 – July 29, 1856
Schumann was a German composer and pianist in the Romantic period of Classical music.
Probably no composer ever rivaled Schumann in concentrating his energies on one form of music at a time. At first all his creative impulses were translated into pianoforte music, then followed the miraculous year of the songs. In 1841 he wrote two of his four symphonies. The year 1842 was devoted to the composition of chamber music, and includes the pianoforte quintet (op. 44), now one of his best known and most admired works. In 1843 he wrote Paradise and the Pen, his first essay at concerted vocal music.
On the 27th of February, 1854 he threw himself into the Rhine. He was rescued by some boatmen, but when brought to land was determined to be quite insane. He suffered from syphilis, that had not been properly treated and that developed into its tertiary stage. He was taken to a private asylum in Endenich near Bonn, and remained there until his death on the 29th of July 1856. He was buried at Bonn, and in 1880 a statue by A. Donndorf was erected on his tomb.. He experienced periods of great productivity and creativity, while from the mid-1840s on he suffered periodic attacks of severe depression and nervous exhaustion, and contemplated or attempted suicide a number of
Florence Nightingale
May 12, 1820 – August 13, 1910
The Lady With The Lamp – was the pioneer of modern nursing
Inspired by what she understood to be a divine calling (first experienced in 1837 at the age of 17 at Embley Park and later throughout her life), Nightingale made a commitment to nursing, a career with a poor reputation and filled mostly by poorer women
The world’s most famous nurse is believed to have suffered from a bipolar disorder, and she once said God had called her to her work and that she heard voices.
Nightingale suffered from a bipolar disorder that caused long periods of depression and remarkable bursts of productivity.
“Florence heard voices and experienced a number of severe depressive episodes in her teens and early 20s – symptoms consistent with the onset of bipolar disorder,” e
Charles Pierre Baudelaire
April 9, 1821-August 31, 1867)
He was one of the most influential French poets. He was also an important critic and translator Called ‘the father of modern criticism,’ who shocked his contemporaries with his visions of lust and decay. Baudelaire was the first to equate modern, artificial, and decadent. In Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863, The Painter of Modern Life) Baudelaire argued in favor of artificiality, stating that vice is natural in that it is selfish, while virtue is artificial because we must restrain our natural impulses in order to be good. The snobbish aesthete, the dandy was for Baudelaire the ultimate hero and the best proof of an absolutely purposeless existence. He is a gentleman who never becomes vulgar and always preserves the cool smile of the stoic
Baudelaire’s confrontation of depression with the consumption of drugs such as opium, hashish and alcohol was a major influence on his work. Many of his poems were influenced by his interest in “les correspondances”, or synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is the mixing of the senses, that is, the ability to smell colors or see sounds. He wrote several poems about the subject itself, such as “Correspondances”, and used imagery and symbolism based on the experiences of synaesthesia. In general, Baudelaire was a sensualist, in love with sensations, and he tried to experience them and express them in abundance.
Baudelaire was affected by bipolar disorder, commonly known as manic depression. —
Leo Nikolayevitch Tolstoy
September 9 (August 28, O.S), 1828 – November 20 (November 7, O.S.), 1910
Tolstoy was a Russian novelist, reformer, and moral thinker, notable for his influence on Russian literature and politics. As a count, he was a member of the Tolstoy family of Russian nobility.
Tolstoy was one of the giants of 19th century Russian literature. His most famous works include the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and many shorter works, including the novellas The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Hadji Murad
Tolstoy’s private life is well known in Russia. He lived his entire life in Yasnaya Polyana. On September 23, , the 34 year old Tolstoy married Sonya Andreyevna Behrs, a girl of 18. Their marriage has been described by A.N.Wilson as one of the unhappiest in literary history, and was marked from the outset by Tolstoy on the eve of his marriage giving his diaries of his bachelor escapades to Sonya, which he made her read. These detailed Tolstoy’s sexual relations with his serfs. He even admits to taking a young lady’s virtue, who was forever disgraced by the encounter (incredibly, he used this as the basis of Resurrection).
His relationship with his wife further deteriorated as his beliefs became increasingly radical. In one journal entry, she writes of him becoming increasingly suicidal, unable to reconcile his faith with the material world. Sonya bore him 13 children, 7 of whom survived to adulthood.
He died of pneumonia at Astapovo station on Nov.20,1910 after leaving home in the middle of winter at the age of 82.
Charles John Huffam Dickens
February 7, 1812 – June 9, 1870
Dickens, pen-name “Boz “, was an English novelist of the Victorian era. The popularity of his books/short stories during his lifetime and to the present is demonstrated by the fact that none of his novels have ever gone out of print
Dickens separated from his wife in 1858. In Victorian times divorce was almost unthinkable particularly for someone as famous as Charles Dickens and he continued to maintain her in a house for the next twenty years until she died. Although they were initially happy together, Catherine did not seem to share quite the same boundless energy for life which Dickens had. Her job of looking after their ten children and the pressure of living with and keeping house for a world famous novelist certainly did not help. Catherine’s sister Georgina moved in to help her but there were rumors that Charles was romantically linked to his sister-in-law. An indication of his marital dissatisfaction was when in 1855 he went to meet his first love Maria Beadnell. Maria was by this time married as well but she seems to have fallen short of Dickens’ romantic memory of her.
He was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb reads: “He was a sympathizer to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England’s greatest writers is lost to the world.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens – Mark Twain
November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910
Mark Twain was a famous and popular American humorist, writer and lecturer
At his peak, he was probably the most popular American celebrity of his time. William Faulkner wrote he was “the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.” His pseudonym was derived from the shout used to mark how deep the water was for river boats – “by the mark, twain” (in other words, mark two fathoms).
In his later life, Twain was a very depressed man, but still capable. Twain was able to respond “The report of my death is an exaggeration” in the New York Journal, June 2nd 1897. He lost 3 out of 4 of his children, and his beloved wife, Olivia Langdon, before his death in 1910. He also had some very bad times with his businesses. His publishing company ended up going bankrupt, and he lost thousands of dollars on one typesetting machine that was never finished. He also lost a great deal of revenue on royalties from his books being plagiarized before he even had a chance to publish them himself.
Twain himself died less than one year later. He wrote in 1909, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.” And so he did.
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