Kay Redfield Jamison

Psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison has said of her own experience with bipolar disorder: “When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones.”

Other accomplished women who have a history of unipolar depression or bipolar include Linda Hamilton, Mariette Hartley, Jane Pauley, Alanis Morissette, Sarah McLachlan, Lorraine Bracco, Carrie Fisher, and, in the news recently, Brooke Shields.

Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell [photo], acclaimed for her forensic novels such as Predator, admitted in a Times [London] interview [I'm not weird, I'm just wired differently, by Andrew Billen, Dec 06, 2005] that she has had her own difficulties: “My wiring’s not perfect and there are ways that you can stabilise that. I have certain things that run in my own ancestry. It’s not unusual for great artistic people to have bipolar disorder, for example. The diagnosis goes back and forth but I’m pretty sure that I am. I take a mood stabiliser.”

photo of Patricia Cornwell by John Earle

> book: Kay Redfield Jamison. Touched With Fire : Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament

> related page: Depression and Creativity
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creativity and madness, creative experience, mental health books, creative personality type

  01.07.06   By Douglas Eby   |  
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