The Bipolar Team

One Internet observer has noted that each list of notable historical figures or contemporary celebrities who may have had the disorder seems like a recruiting list for the “Bipolar Team.” An impressive team it is. We have many historical creative types: Plato, Michelangelo, Isaac Newton, Martin Luther, Ludwig van Beethoven, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, J.P. Morgan, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe. 

Maybe we who suffer from bipolar disorder just want the list to be impressive to further the cause of bipolar.  Support groups like to claim famous people. We know there seems to be a connection between bipolar disorder and creativity. That creativity combined with the high functionality of bipolar II disorder has produced some prodigious talent.

Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh bats clean up on the team.  The International Bipolar Foundation designates the birthday of Van Gogh (March 30) as World Bipolar Day.  Van Gogh had many of the tell tale signs of bipolar disorder. He wrote long, incoherent letters. He had sleep problems. He had religious obsessions, once even serving as a missionary. He had romantic entanglements. His productivity was impressive (some 2,100 works of art). He drank and smoked excessively. 

Psychobiography Controversy

In recent years there has been some question as to the accuracy of the posthumous diagnosis. Posthumous diagnoses should always be considered problematic. Nevertheless, this book indulges in them liberally. But in an informal way. Psychobiography is controversial. But no real harm can come to the deceased. George Patton psychobiographer Jim Sudmeier has noted: “One more author’s opinion cannot cause undue harm to a public figure when he or she is long since dead.”         

Was bipolar disorder really the source of Van Gogh’s troubles? His psychotic episodes were short, which tends to rule out schizophrenia. Other possibilities have been offered in recent years to explain his illness. Lead exposure will cause similar symptoms. But did he have a lifelong exposure to lead? Syphilis is also mentioned in connection to Van Gogh’s health problems, but he didn’t live long enough to have developed neurosyphilis mental disorder. It’s certain that Van Gogh suffered from numerous conditions related to bipolar disorder, such as anxiety. And he had what we’d call comorbidities today.

In any case, Van Gogh is a tragic symbol, but he’s ours. He’s on our team.