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Famous People with a Family History Suggesting Bipolar Disorders
Here are a couple of more paragraphs, from pages 236 - 237 of
"Touched With Fire; Manic-Depressive Ilness and the Artistic
Temperament."
[she writes about the family trees of afflicted people]
"All these pedigrees demonstrate the wide range of
expression of a genetic illness, from its milder forms, which can
appear as temperaments, to the more psychotic and suicidal forms
that appear as full-blown manic depressive insanity.
"Obviously, many other writers, artists, and composers
had family members who suffered from manic-depressive illness or
severe recurrent depressions, were declared insane and committed
to asylums or hospitals, or committed suicide. Those with at
least ONE SERIOUSLY AFFECTED FIRST-DEGREE RELATIVE (often there
were several include):
- Hans Christian Andersen
- Konstantin Batyushkov
- Arthur and E.F. Benson
- Elizabeth Bishop
- Aleksandr Blok
- Charlotte and Emily Bronte
- Anton Bruckner
- Thomas Campbell
- Thomas Chatterton
- Samuel Clemens
- John Sell Cotman
- Gustave Courbet
- Richard Dadd
- Isak Dinesen
- Ernest Dowson
- Thomas Eakins
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Edward FitzGerald
- Robert Frost
- Thomas Gainsborough
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe
- Nikolai Gogol
- Kenneth Graham
- Thomas Gray
- Hermann Hesse
- Charles Lamb
- Louis MacNeice
- John Martin
- Marianne Moore
- Edvard Munch
- Francis Parkman
- Walker Percy
- Sylvia Plath
- Jackson Pollock
- Cole Porter
- Edwin Arlington Robinson
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti
- Giocchino Rossini
- John Rishkin
- Alexander Scriabin
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Peter Tchaikovsky
- J.M.W. Turner
- Walt Whitman - more...
- Emile Zola
"These findings are consistent with those of Dr.S
Andreasen, McNeil, Richards, and Karlsson (chapter 3) showing
that mental illness and creativity tend to aggregate in certain
families and not in others. The high rates of mood disorders and
suicide in the literary and artistic families portrayed in this
chapter are also consistent with studies showing greatly
increased rates of manic depressive and depressive illness in the
first degree relatives of individuals who have manic depressive
illness.
"It is important to emphasize, however, that many writers
and artists have no family history of these illnesses, nor do
they themselves suffer from depression or manic depressive
illness. This point is critical. The basic argument of this book
is not that all writers and artists are depressed, suicidal, or
manic. It is, rather, that a greatly disproportionate number of
them are; that the manic depressive and artistic temperaments are
causally related to one another. The genetic basis of manic
depressive illness provides not only one part of this argument,
but also the constitutional core of a determining temperament,
one providing in part the sealed orders with which so many
sail."
Modified August 6, 2004
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