With his trademark sky-blue Fender Mustang guitar and godforsaken, angst-ridden scream of a voice, Kurt Cobain mobilized a generation of freaks and geeks in the early ‘90s, knocking Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard charts and chaperoning the mainstream into a new age of enlightenment fueled by punk and alternative rock. For Generation…
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1726) was a British mad scientist with bipolar disorder and a torrent of discoveries in the world of science, mathematics, and physics, from laws to theories to facts.
It’s one of the most recognizable guitar riffs in rock history and it was written by a bipolar musical genius from London. “You Really Got Me” by The Kinks is only two chords, but just try to get it out of your head once you’ve heard it.
Jazz great Miles Davis just may have been bipolar, according to Don Cheadle, who plays the triumphant trumpeter in a new biopic he directed titled Miles Ahead, in theaters now.
Moody to be sure, Beethoven was many things: depressed, manic, euphoric, prolific, arrogant, unkempt, financially reckless, egotistical, suicidal, self-centered, a hypochondriac, and an alcoholic, to name a few. But his music — some would argue — is the best ever written.
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream is as iconic as The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, Guernica by Pablo Picasso, and The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí. It has been called “A Mona Lisa for our time.” And it was born out of a bipolar hallucination.
Drip. Drip. Drip. SPLAT. Drip. Drip. SLATHER. Drip. Drip. SPLAT. That’s the sound of Jackson Pollock, stick in hand in a barn-turned-studio on Long Island, drenching his canvas with paint for his latest masterpiece. We’ve all seen his iconic, messy paintings, but what about the man behind the mess?
Marilyn Monroe is one of the most iconic celebrities in American history. She’s right up there with Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson for her fame fingerprint. Her face is emblazoned in the pantheons of art history as the beautiful subject of many Andy Warhol screenprints. She was the ultimate sex symbol – Playboy magazine’s…
Author of nine novels, six short story compilations, and 14 nonfiction books, Woolf is one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century. And she was very self-aware of her mental illness.
“Every now and then I hear voices in my head, but not very clear,” Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson told the New York Times Magazine in 2004. “I can’t understand what they are saying. It’s a mental illness. I have been diagnosed as a manic depressive.”
