Famous women with bipolar disorder describe their illness, in words both haunting and hopeful. This list encompasses writers, actresses and musicians — creative, intelligent, intense people.
According to a study reported in 2013, the mental processes of more creative people involve more stimuli than those of less creative people.
In their own words, the following women offer a glimpse into the strain of their over-saturated mental processes and, in some cases, how they adapted.
1) Virginia Woolf, 1882 - 1941, Writer, Feminist, Publisher
“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”
2) Vivian Leigh, 1913 - 1967, Actress
Most famous for playing Scarlett O'Hara in “Gone with the Wind,” Vivian Leigh lived in a time when few options for treatment existed. In an era when actresses fiercely protected their reputation, Leigh did not speak publicly about manic depression, as it was then called, but her husband, actor Laurence Olivier did.
Olivier wrote in his memoir, “Throughout her possession by that uncannily evil monster, manic depression, with its deadly ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness – an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me, for whom she could hardly be expected to take the trouble.”
- from “Confessions of an Actor: Laurence Olivier an Autobiography”
3) Catherine Zeta-Jones, Actress
Zeta-Jones told "InStyle Magazine" in 2012, “I’m not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops, but with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it's completely controllable. I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that those who don't have it under control will seek help with all that is available to treat it.”
4) Jane Pauley, Journalist
While hosting the PBS Documentary “TAKE ONE STEP: Caring for Depression,” Jane Pauley shared, “When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder the year I turned 50, it was certainly a shock. But as a journalist, knowing a little bit about a lot of things, I didn't suffer the misconception that depression was all in my head or a mark of poor character. I knew it was a disease, and, like all diseases, was treatable.”
5) Sinead O’Connor, Musician
”Every pore of you is crying and you don't even understand why or what," she said. "I actually kind of died and got born again as a result of taking the meds and having a chance to, you know, build a life.”
- The Oprah Winfrey Show, 2007
6) Demi Lovato, Actress, Singer
“I learned that you go through things, you deal with them and that's what empowers you and ultimately makes you a happy person.”
7) Lady Gaga, Songwriter, Singer
“Depression is just like any season, it will change, and before you know it you will see the first flower blooming. Then another. Then another. Before you know it your whole life will be in bloom. And you’ll no longer remember the winter.”
- from BrainyQuote
8) Kay Redfield Jamison, Clinical Psychologist, Writer, Co-Director of Mood Disorder Center and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins Medicine
“I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do. I believe, in short, that we are equally beholden to heart and mind, and that those who have particularly passionate temperaments and questioning minds leave the world a different place for their having been there.”
- NPR
Jamison posits that mental illness is less an unfortunate aberration than a necessary asset enriching the human experience. Like the discarded term “disabled,” those with mental illness are also “differently-abled,” contributing insight, creativity and intensity to the world.
If you disagree, take a gander at 11 Historical Geniuses and Their Possible Mental Disorders.
Be brave and be well!
Sources:
Creativity and schizotypy from the neuroscience perspective. springer.com. Retrieved February 25, 2015.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13415-013-0210-6
The Benefits of Restlessness and Jagged Edges. NPR.org. Retrieved February 25, 2015.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4675356
Brainy Quotes. Accessed February 25, 2015.
http://www.brainyquote.com.
Reviewed March 2, 2015
by Michele Blacksberg RN
Edited by Jody Smith