10 biographies
Famous Bipolar Writers & Authors
No group has been studied more closely for links to bipolar disorder than writers. Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain all left records of elation and despair in their own words.
Hans Christian Andersen
Fairy tales written by a man whose diaries record wild elation and crushing gloom.
Tim Burton
The director's gothic imagination has long been linked to mood extremes.
Agatha Christie
The best-selling novelist of all time, and her unexplained 11-day disappearance.
Patricia Cornwell
The crime writer has spoken openly about her bipolar diagnosis and treatment.
T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land was written during a breakdown at a Swiss sanatorium.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The transcendentalist's journals swing between rapture and paralysing despondency.
Kay Redfield Jamison
The world's leading authority on bipolar disorder - and bipolar herself.
Edgar Allan Poe
Terror, genius and collapse: the archetype of the tormented writer.
Mark Twain
America's funniest man carried a lifelong undertow of depression.
Virginia Woolf
The most studied case in literary history of what we now call bipolar disorder.