Some interesting information about the famously ill: (all pulled from "A Brilliant Maddness," by Patty Duke)
Handel - His biographer, in 1785 wrote, "Handels' general look was somewhat heavy and sour; but when he did smile, it was his sire the sun, bursting out of a black cloud."
"Handel…left little written record of his psychological and emotional world. But in light of his recurrent mood cycles, modern psychiatric opinion agrees that he was a victim of cyclothymia, one of the milder forms of manic-depressive illness."
"Handel had long periods of high energy and extraordinary productivity, interrupted by episodes of depression that blunted his ability to work. His major depressions were called 'nervous breakdowns,' and during those times he was pessimistic and despondent, had a poor appetite and difficulty sleeping -- the hallmarks of depression."
"Typical of those with manic-depressive illness, Handle's mood swings cycled with the seasons: depressed times came in the late spring and early summer; late summer and early autumn brought bursts of productivity. In the early 1740s, his librettist Charles Jennens described Handle as having a head 'more full of maggots than ever." His biographer Percy Young wrote, 'The maggots came from mental derangement on the one hand and flooding inspiration on the other."
Robert Schumann - "His father, an author, translator and publisher, was an unstable, ambitious and brooding man who reportedly suffered a nervous breakdown from which he never fully recovered. Like his son, he worked in phenomenal burst of energy. During one 18-month period, he wrote seven novels. Robert's mother suffered from recurrent depressions. His sister committed suicide. One of his sons went insane in his early twenties and was confined to an asylum for 31 years. Another son became a morphine addict."
Schumann himself, "described his own struggles with mania and melancholy. He wrote..., 'In the night between the 17th and 18 of October [1833], I was seized with the worst fear a man can have. the worst punishment Heaven can inflict --the fear of losing one's reason....Terror drove me from place to place. My breath filed me as I pictured my brain paralyzed...No one knows the suffering, the sickness, the despair, except those so crushed.
"' And if we musicians live so often, as you know we do, on sunny heights, the sadness of reality cuts all the deeper when it lies naked before our eyes.'"
Composer Hector Berlioz, "described his affliction as a 'moral sickness, a disease of isolation. There are...two kinds of spleen,' he wrote in his memoirs, 'one mocking, active, passionate, malignant; the other morose and wholly passive, when one's only wish is for silence and solitude and the oblivion of sleep. For anyone possessed by this latter kind, nothing has meaning, the destruction of a world would hardly move him. At such times I could wish the earth were a shell filled with gunpowder, to which I would put a match for my diversion.'"
Gustav Mahler - "Lamented that he was a prisoner of his mood swings. When he was nineteen, he wrote to a childhood friend: ‘The fires of a supreme zest for living and the most gnawing desire for death alternate in my heart, sometimes in the course of a single hour. I know only one thing: I cannot go on like this…’"
"While many of manic depression’s victims have lived tempestuous lives that ended in suicide or confinement in mental institutions, they may also have brilliant contributions to society: Lord Byron and Edgar Allan Poe, Ann Sexton and Virginia Woolf, Vincent Van Gogh."
Oliver Cromwell - "The 17th-century commander-in-chief and Lord Protector of England, has been described by his biographers as manic-depressive or cyclothymic."
Abraham Lincoln - His "depressions, some of which were suicidal, are legendary. New York’s Dr. Ronald Fieve has called him a ‘mild bipolar manic-depression,’ but his depressions were more obvious than his highs."
Menachem Begin - "The controversial former Prime Minister of Israel, was subject to sweeping mood swings throughout his public career. Periods of abject depression rotated with times of frenetic activity. Often he worked with a vengeance, then retreated into bleak seclusion, avoiding all but the most important public appearances."
Winston Churchill - His, "biographer Anthony Storr describes him as cyclothymic, with alternating periods of severe depression and high energy that sometimes affected his judgment. In Churchill: The Man, Storr wrote: ‘…had he been a stable and equable man, he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded we were finished.’"
"He also wrote: ‘All those who worked with Churchill paid tribute to the enormous fertility of his new ideas, the inexhaustible stream of invention which poured from him…[they]also agreed that he needed the most severe restraint put upon him, and that many of his ideas, if they had been put into practice, would have been utterly disastrous.
Robert Campeau - "The entrepreneur and former owner of Bloomingdale’s, Jordan Marsh, and Burdine’s, has apparently never been called manic-depressive, but he does seem to have the temperament noted by Dr. [Ronald] Fieve. As Fortune magazine, in a 1988 story, said of Campeau, ‘eccentric may be too tame a word [for him].’"
One person who worked with him said, "He, ‘can go from high to low in about two seconds.'" And " Mr. Campeau has said of himself, ‘I’m full of the spice of life.’ In January 1990 he lost control of his retail stores and his company filed for bankruptcy protection."
John Mulheren Jr. - "Described by writer Connie Bruck in a New Yorker article as a ‘legendary Wall Street trader,’ broke the code of silence about manic-depressive illness when he protested in court that his manic-depressive illness, while it often enhanced his abilities on Wall Street, also distorted his reasoning and judgment. Mr. Mulheren was a former fello-arbitrageur with Ivan Boesky, an admitted felon whose cooperation with the government precipitated a rush of Wall Street prosecutions. Mr. Mulheren was convicted of manipulating Gulf + Western stock by driving up the price as a favor to Boesky. His conviction was overturned on appeal."
Mulheren said through the New Yorker article that , "’The depressive part of his cycle, which rendered him so profoundly anergic that he would take to his bed, unable to process even simple information, robbed him of perhaps 30 days a year…In his excited, hypomanic state, he did his most inspired trading.’"
"’When I would finally get high enough that it impaired my judgment, I’d lose – and I’d get so bummed out by losing that I would just leave. I’d say, Let’s all to Atlantic City. Or I’d go out on my boat. Or I’d go shopping. I love to buy stuff when I’m high. I say, Gee, I really like this shirt – I’ll by nine of them, in every color.’"
F. Scott Fitzgerald - "wrote, ‘I was drunk for many years and then I died.’"
Earnest Hemingway - "Suffered from a mood disorder, reportedly drank 16 double frozen daiquiris in one night at a Havana bar."
Memphis Slim - "Dr. Hagop Akiskal and his wife, Kareen, a psychologist…suggest that the song Born with the blues by Memphis Slim, a prominent blues musician who died recently, shows an insight into the nature of mood disorders ‘deeper than that of many professionals.’ The haunting lyrics are in part: ‘My mama had them, her mama had them, Now I’ve got them too…I’ve got something, something you just don’t learn in school. You’ll never find them in no books…You just got to inherit the blues. When I’m sad and lonely, even when I am happy too. All of the sudden, I find myself singing the blues. That’s why I know I was born with them.’"