Do you remember what it was like when you first realized that you were gay? Looking back, maybe there were telltale signs. But the determination of your identity, once arrived at, brought into crystal clear focus all of the red flags — transgressive gender leanings and secret crushes — you had missed or pretended to miss along the way. Perhaps your understanding of who you are, who you had always been, underwent a shift as the pieces fell into place with an audible snap and an “Aha!” and, just maybe, an “Aw, crap...”

This was my experience of coming out to myself as a lesbian when I was a teenager, this simultaneously shocking and not-so-surprising realigning and re-conceptualizing of my own history and personal identity. Not too long ago, I learned something else about myself that brought about a similar, curiously intermingled sense of dissonance and “Aha!” Two years ago, at the age of 27, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

While I have had relatively little trouble shrugging off the social stigma of being gay and embracing that part of who I am, I struggled in vain for over 10 years to deny and hide my ongoing struggles with chronic, debilitating depression and anxiety. Only recently have I begun to take the lessons I learned from standing up for myself as a gay woman and apply them to the challenges I face as a woman suffering from mental illness. It’s a sad reality that the secrecy, shame and sense of isolation that so often go hand-in-hand with mood disorders and other forms of mental illness compound the anguish experienced by those of us who suffer from them.

So, in the spirit of National Mental Health Awareness Month, I’m coming out. I’m making an effort to be open and honest about what it’s like to deal with mental illness, and to educate myself so that I can live better and reach out to and educate others. As part of this effort, for the past few months I have been reading everything I can find on bipolar illness. This week I finally got my hands on a copy of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.

The definitive work on the link between creativity and bipolar disorder (formerly and sometimes still known as “manic depression”), this book was published 15 years ago, and there is still nothing out there like it. Kay Redfield Jamison is a professor of psychiatry at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine and is considered one of the foremost authorities on bipolar disorder. The author of multiple books on the subject, she is also, herself, bipolar. In Touched with Fire, Jamison takes on the cultural notion of the artist as “mad genius.” Utilizing both scientific and biographical approaches, the author mounts a compelling argument suggesting not only that many of the most brilliant artistic minds in history were afflicted with bipolar depression and mania, but that the very nature of their bipolar symptoms may well have contributed to their creative successes.

Bipolar disorder is thought to affect roughly one in a hundred people. The illness is characterized by extreme changes in mood with depressive lows at one end of the scale and dangerous emotional highs (known as “mania”) on the other. In terms of Jamison’s argument, it is the low-level manic phase of the disorder that is particularly interesting. Common symptoms associated with hypomania (“mini-mania”) include elevated mood, confidence, high energy, increased creativity and mental acuity, and a decreased need for sleep — in short, ideal conditions under which to hole up and feverishly pen the great American novel, compose a symphony or paint a masterpiece.

Examining the lives, writings, documented emotional states and family histories of figures like composer Robert Schumann, writers Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemmingway, artist Vincent Van Gogh, poet Lord Byron and many others, Jamison makes the case that some of the most celebrated artists over the past three centuries were recognizably bipolar, came from bipolar families and that creativity was as likely an inherited quality in these families as was susceptibility toward alternating periods of depression and mania. Sure enough, studies conducted over the past 20 years and cited in the book have shown a pronounced trend: the likelihood of experiencing bipolar disorder is astronomically higher if a close relative has it. (In Alfred Lord Tennyson’s family tree, for instance, relatives without some form of mental illness are the exception to the rule, with bipolar disorder and unipolar depression in particular affecting half of his immediate relatives going back at least three generations.)

Touched With Fire is weighty, but written and organized in a straightforward, layman-friendly manner. You don’t have to be a doctor or have firsthand experience with mental illness to grasp the author’s arguments. But if you or anyone you love has ever struggled with bipolar or unipolar depression, I cannot recommend this book to you highly enough. While it illustrates the many attendant dangers, risks and miseries of bipolar disorder, it also painstakingly outlines the unique advantages and strengths common among bipolar folks, the good of it with the bad. Perhaps more importantly, it celebrates the heights to which we can reach despite or even in part due to our struggles with staggering emotional pain.

Finally, Jamison poses the question: without the impetus of such drastic emotional highs and lows to compel so many artists to heal themselves in the act of creation, would the rich human histories of literature, music and the arts paint an altogether more drab and dull picture of our collective experience? As a writer, I have wondered about this in myself. Regardless, I stand reassured that I am in good company.

Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, by Kay Redfield Jamison
Simon & Schuster Inc., 1994
370 pages, Paperback
GENRE(S): Nonfiction, Mental Illness, Bipolar Disorder