FAMOUS PERSONALITIES with M.ILLNESS

FAMOUS PERSONALITIES WITH MENTAL ILLNESS

MENTAL ILLNESS – DEFINITION 

Mental illness is a collective term that refers to all the different types of mental conditions, including those that affect your mood, your thinking and your behavior. To be classified as mental illness, the condition must cause distress in your life and reduce your ability to function in one or more areas of your life, such as at work, in relationships or in social situations.

This article is so awe inspiring that we certainly need more awareness on this subject. Symptom management as well as recovery for many people living with mental illness is indeed possible. Just the same as it is for many people that face physical disabilities.

People living with mental disabilities should not be generically and stereotypically viewed as individuals who are simply hopeless and have no chance for a future. Those living with mental illness instead should be encouraged and supported in their quest to live their best lives. 

Buzz Aldrin

American Aviator and Astronaut; he was the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11, during the first moon landing. He was the second man to set foot on the Moon after Mission Commander Neil Armstrong. In his autobiography, Return to Earth, Aldrin details an account of his struggles with clinical depression in the years following his NASA career.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Composer. In the book, Manic Depression and Creativity, authors Dr. Jablow Hershman and Dr. Julian Lieb argue quite convincingly that the great composer was manic depressive: “I joyfully hasten to meet death,” Beethoven wrote as his deafness made itself apparent, “… for will it not deliver me from endless suffering?”

An 1801 letter to a friend refers to a two-year-long depression. The next year he is begging Providence for “but one more day of pure joy.” In 1813, he may have attempted suicide, disappearing and was found three days later. In 1816, he wrote: “During the last six weeks my health has been so shaky, so that I often think of death, but without fear …” 

Recent scientific analysis of Beethoven’s hair has given rise to speculation that lead poisoning may have been a cause of his depression.

Lord Byron

Poet and Politician; he obtained a reputation as being extravagant, melancholy, courageous, unconventional, eccentric, flamboyant and controversial. He was independent and given to extremes of temper; on at least one trip, his traveling companions were so puzzled by his mood swings they thought he was mentally ill. He believed his depression was inherited, and he wrote in 1821, “I am not sure that long life is desirable for one of my temper & constitutional depression of Spirits.” [The New York Times (1898-02-26) and The Hudson Review.]

Winston Churchill

Politician and British Prime Minister. Churchill often referred to depression as his “black dog”. He is also recorded to have undergone manic phases of intense productivity. The series Altered Statesmen suggests that Churchill may have had cyclothymia.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Author, Poet and Philosopher. When Emerson’s first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, died of tuberculosis at the age of 20, he was heavily affected by her death, visiting her grave daily and once even opening her coffin to see for himself that she was dead. [Cheever, Susan (2006), American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work.]

Stephen Fry

Actor, Comedian and Writer. In a BBC documentary, Fry stated that he was diagnosed as having Bipolar Disorder.

“I went into my garage, sealed the door with a duvet I’d brought and got into my car. I sat there for at least, I think, two hours, my hands on the ignition key.” “I do have extremes of moods that are greater than just about anybody else I know.”

Tom Harrell

American post bops jazz artist and composer; suffers from Paranoid Schizophrenia. He has to contend with severe side effects of anti-psychotic drugs, including muscle spasms, weight gain and more. Despite his disease, he continues to perform worldwide.

Ernest Miller Hemingway

American Novelist and Journalist. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was treated with electro convulsive therapy (ECT) for his depression and paranoia. This may, in fact, have contributed to precipitate his suicide, since he reportedly suffered significant memory loss as a result of the shock treatment, which he cited as a reason for not wanting to live.

Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961 and received ECT treatment again. Three weeks shy of his 62nd birthday, he died at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, the result of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. Judged not mentally responsible for his final act, he was buried in a Roman Catholic church. Hemingway himself blamed the ECT treatment for “putting him out of business” by destroying his memory. Some medical and scholarly opinion has been receptive to this view, although others, including one of the physicians who prescribed the treatment, dispute that opinion.

His condition may have been genetic. Other members of Hemingway’s immediate family also committed suicide, including his father Clarence, his siblings Ursula and Leicester, and possibly his granddaughter Margaux. Some believe that certain members of Hemingway’s paternal line had a hereditary disease known as haemochromatosis (bronze diabetes), in which an excess of iron concentration in the blood causes damage to the pancreas and also causes depression or instability in the cerebrum. Hemingway’s father is known to have developed haemochromatosis in the years prior to his suicide at the age of fifty-nine.

Vivien Leigh

English Actress; she won two Academy Awards for playing Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Affected by Bipolar Disorder for most of her adult life, she gained a reputation for being a difficult person to work with.

In January 1953, shortly after filming commenced on Elephant Walk, she suffered a breakdown and Paramount Pictures replaced her with Elizabeth Taylor. Her husband, Laurance Olivier, took her to their home in England, where between periods of incoherence, Leigh told him that she had been having an affair. She gradually recovered over a period of several months.

As a result of this episode, many of the Oliviers’ friends learned of her problems. David Niven said she had been “quite, quite mad”; and in his diary, Noel Coward expressed surprise that “things had been bad and getting worse since 1948 or thereabouts.”

In 1960, she and Olivier divorced and he married the actress Joan Plowright. In his autobiography, Confessions Of An Actor, he discussed the years of problems they had experienced because of Leigh’s illness, writing, “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.”

Spike Milligan

Comedian and Writer. “I had to write a new show every week for six months. If Hitler had done that to someone it would be called torture. I was in such a state of hypertension that I was unapproachable by human beings. I became a Manic Depressive.” [The Guardian]

John Forbes Nash

American Mathematician; shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was the subject of the multiple Oscar-winning movie, A Beautiful Mind, based on the biography of the same name about his mathematical genius and struggle with Schizophrenia.

Nash first displayed signs of schizophrenia in 1958. He became paranoid and was admitted to the McLean Hospital in 1959, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and mild clinical depression. He remained in and out of mental hospitals until 1970, being given insulin shock therapy and antipsychotic medication. After 1970, by his choice, he never took antipsychotic medication again but gradually learned to accept and control his symptoms.

Sir Isaac Newton

English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, alchemist and theologian; he became quite eccentric in later life. After his death, Newton’s body was found to have had massive amounts of mercury in it, probably resulting from his alchemical pursuits. Mercury poisoning is considered to be the likely cause of Newton’s madness.

Florence Nightingale

Nurse and health campaigner. “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” [Dr. Kathy Wisner, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center]. In 1847, she spent time in Rome recovering from a mental breakdown precipitated by a continuing crisis in her relationship with poet and politician, Robert Monckton Milnes.

Vaslav Nijinsky

Ballet dancer and choreographer; Nijinsky had a nervous breakdown in 1919, and his career effectively ended. He was diagnosed with Schizophrenia and was taken to Switzerland by his wife, where he was treated unsuccessfully by psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler. He spent the rest of his life in and out of psychiatric hospitals and asylums.

Edgar Allan Poe

Poet and writer. Increasingly unstable after his wife’s death, Poe attempted to court the poet Sarah Helen Whitman. Their engagement failed, purportedly because of Poe’s drinking and erratic behavior. On October 3, 1849, Poe was found wandering the streets of Baltimore, delirious, “in great distress, and… in need of immediate assistance”, according to Joseph W. Walker, the man who found him. He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he died on Sunday, October 7, 1849. Poe was never coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition, and oddly, was wearing clothes that were not his own.

Axl Rose

Singer. “I went to a clinic, thinking it would help my moods. The only thing I did was take one 500-question test - ya know, filling in the little black dots. All of sudden I’m diagnosed Manic-Depressive.” [Here Today... Gone To Hell! Articles > The world according to W. Axl Rose by Del James]

Robert Schumann

German composer and music critic; one of the most famous Romantic composers of the 19th century. For the last two years of his life, after an attempted suicide, Schumann was confined to a mental institution. The death of his brother Julius as well as that of his sister-in-law Rosalie in 1833 seemed to have affected Schumann profoundly, leading to his first apparent attempt at suicide. In late February, 1854, Schumann’s symptoms increased again, his angelic visions sometimes being replaced by demonic visions. He warned his wife, Clara, that he feared he might do her harm. On February 27, 1854, he attempted suicide by throwing himself from a bridge into the Rhine. Rescued by boatmen and taken home, he asked to be taken to an asylum for the insane. He entered Dr. Franz Richarz’s sanitarium in Endenich, Bonn and remained there for more than two years, until his death. Schumann’s symptoms suggest that he may have been Schizophrenic.

Dr. Vashishtha Narayan Singh

World renowned mathematician and an ex-NASA scientist from Bihar, India. Vashishtha had been suffering from Schizophrenia since 1976. He worked for NASA on the Apollo series during the 60’s and is well known for challenging Einstein’s theory of relativity. In later life, Vashishtha returned to his home in India where he spent many years in extreme poverty, his family unable to afford his much needed treatment. [Hindustan Times, timesofindia.indiatimes.com] It is believed, though substantiation is difficult, that Indian authorities, under pressure, have intervened to provide for his welfare.

Vincent Willem van Gogh

Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide.

There has been much debate over the years as to the source of Van Gogh’s mental illness and its effect on his work. Over 150 psychiatrists have attempted to label his illness, and some 30 different diagnoses have been suggested. Diagnoses which have been put forward include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, syphilis, poisoning from swallowed paints, temporal lobe epilepsy and acute intermittent porphyria. Any of these could have been the culprit and aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia, and a fondness for absinthe in particular.

Virginia Woolf

English novelist and essayist, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of several nervous breakdowns. The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalized. Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods, may have also been induced by the sexual abuse she was subjected to by her half-brothers George and Gerald as she recalled in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate.

Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by drastic mood swings. Though these recurring mental breakdowns greatly affected her social functioning, her literary abilities remained intact. Modern diagnostic techniques have led to a posthumous diagnosis of bipolar disorder, an illness which colored her work, relationships and life, and eventually led to her suicide.

In March 1941, after having another nervous breakdown, Woolf drowned herself by weighing her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home.