Pills, Aliens, Hitler and other Crazy Stuff

I certainly don’t believe that psychiatric medication is magic but would have to conclude that anyone who refuses it to someone who needs it violates human rights. I’m more likely to question mental ‘illness’ philosophically than most people: I am not sure that medicating away your personality traits is ultimately beneficial, when we can learn so much about the human mind and heart from our differences. However, a person who is afflicted with delusions and psychosis would hardly feel that his or her ‘uniqueness’ is comfortable, when medication exists to control this; all of society benefits when violent offenders are calmed therapeutically; certainly there are times of such stark and degrading depression that pills have kept me alive. Do I not deserve to live?

I ask this again: do I not deserve to live? Perhaps I should get to the source of my malaise instead of using a Band-Aid- is that what you are thinking? Perhaps. The source of my malaise is the cruelty of the human race. It is war, torture, rape, child abuse, starvation, religious violence, and the friends and lovers I have buried. Sorry if you’re better equipped to handle the horrors of the human heart, the losses of everyday life: sometimes they eat me alive. I should be tougher, yes, but don’t deserve to die when I’m not as tough as you would like me to be.

Oh, pass my pills, my little darlings.

I cannot argue that psychiatry does not have a long history of abuse, torture, misguided science, futile paths. So does medicine. So does education. So does church. So does the army. So does international aid. Social work. Hospital care. Old folks homes. Should we do away with all of these institutions, or should we continue to work with those who need them to improve them?

It’s incredibly narrow minded of scientologists to believe a blanket ban is merited on psychiatry. Yes, pills have hurt some people. Others have been saved. It’s really an individual choice, isn’t it? And if that person is too nuts to make their own choice, should it not be up to the best intention of their doctor or family, not up to those who use words like ‘consumer survivor advocacy’ without having a clue what they’re talking about. Of course I oppose giving four year olds experimental chemicals instead of taking them off of sugar. But I have no right to oppose my good friend from taking miraculous drugs that made his born-with-it paranoia of microphones and CIA stings and hidden cameras disappear.

Many credit scientology’s stance on psychiatry as a life affirming, spiritual perspective without knowing anything at all about what scientologists believe about mental illness or mental medicine.

Scientologists believe that people who are psychotic- schizophrenia, which affects one per cent of the population, give or take- are immoral and unethical. Hubbard, the leader of this joke religion (and it is a joke, that’s not my take, but the entire intention of the ‘faith’), believed that a psychotic person was plugged into opposing forces. Alien forces. That’s right. In a galaxy very far away, alien creatures devise implants that interfere with the spiritual progress of human earthlings. Those implants are our psychiatric diseases. Now, it’s true that the brain is a mysterious thing that we still do not understand, and I suppose their guess is as good as anyone else’s…

While I also grieve over treatment experiments that went awry, I hardly think, as Hubbard did, that psychiatry exists to lobotomize political dissenters. I doubt that the rambling madmen were of much threat to established regimes. Oh, yeah, and the shrinks are all working on behalf of Russia.

Scientologist marchers hold banners that read Psychiatry Kills. It’s an imperfect science, just like the rest of our endeavours. But the lack of mental health help also kills. Maybe my uncle wouldn’t have jumped in front of a train if there had been good care available to him. Maybe if my girlfriend had gone for help like the rest of our depressed circle, she would not have hung herself in her closet last Thanksgiving. Maybe. There’s no way to be sure.

What we can be sure of is that behind the seemingly good intentions of scientologists- who speak in defense of those who may not be able to speak for themselves- are a bunch of beliefs that actually are, well, insane. Aliens did not program my manic depressive traits. And I’ll decide for myself when and if to medicate. I personally don’t like to numb my creativity if I don’t have to. I also personally think that medication allows a person to be more creative, to live better, in greater balance- or do you think Britney Spears just decided to ‘snap out of it’ after her public meltdown? It doesn’t matter: it’s up to her, it’s up to me, it’s up to Brooke. Maybe before Tom Cruise opens his yap again about his aliens who program postpartum depression in unruly women, he can first be subjected to hormonal injections of pregnancy and birth. We’ll see how he feels and go from there.

These nutcase space freaks also believe psychiatry is mind control. Well, yes. The whole idea is trying to reign in the errant mind, to control it. That’s the whole idea. Now, the question, of course, is whose control? For myself, I’d like it to be me. But there’s the danger of giving up control of your mind to your doctor, sure. Still, this is kind of funny coming from a faith that is all about mind control. Scientology aims to brainwash people. Then they have cleansings, like Operation Snow White, where they remove all negative documentation and proof left behind by dissenters.

Scientologists claim that psychiatry is a purely profit driven industry. Doubtless this is the case in many circumstances- pill production, absolutely. But Scientology itself is a profit driven industry. The whole goal was for a sci-fi writer to create a joke religion and become rich by it. We don’t even know for sure if he believed his sci-fi rhetoric, or if he is laughing at his followers from that galaxy in the ground.

Those evil alien mind controllers also caused Hitler’s psychosis, and so these ever-educated scientologists blame the Holocaust on psychiatry. Hitler suffered from engram, the desire to conquer the world, which was a result of his desire for havingness. He was unable to achieve havingness, and so he took it by force. The engram that still surrounds Germany can only be removed by scientology.

Well, we can blame it on psychiatry if we want. But I’d rather blame it on methamphetamine, to which the dour old megalomaniac was addicted. It was perfectly legal at the time, and perfectly abundant, and everyone knows how meth makes you paranoid, crazy, grandiose, and suicidal. But of course, very few meth addicts can achieve what Hitler did, so it must be the aliens.

Now I’m fully aware that shock treatment can a shady history, but no one’s ever forced it on my mother or me. It’s never even been suggested or recommended. It did not kill my uncle- could it have saved him? There’s no way in hell I’ll ever try it. That’s my choice. Exactly. My therapists and doctors have only ever acted on my behalf. I’ve driven the course of my treatments since childhood, even though I’m the crazy one. And I’ll continue to do so. I suspect I’ve made the wrong choices- I spent way too many years shunning medication and watching everything in my life fall apart. Could lithium have saved me from my impetuous personality, from the consequences of my impulses? Don’t know. I’ve never taken lithium, and I probably never will. But I have nothing against the tremendous benefits I’ve seen it effect for others. My husband tried every narcotic this planet has known, and he said that lithium was the only time in his life that he felt what it was to be normal. Too bad he took methamphetamine instead, and died. Perhaps lithium treatment could have saved him.

Perhaps if Hitler had been forced into care at the first signs of psychosis, and received anticonvulsives or antipsychotics, what then? Could good old-fashioned Valium have saved us this human blight of history? We will never know.

Upstairs in the Crazy House: Touched by Fire, second floor at the Gladstone Hotel

Let’s go back three weeks in time. The day began the same as any other- my eyes pop open just before seven. The orange cat hogging the pillow begins to purr when he feels me stir. And I roll over and wish I had one of those coffee machines you start up with a remote control.

But I don’t have one of those, and so I throw back the blankets and the cat flies toward his food bowl. That’s when I noticed that colour had crept back into the paintings on the wall and the patterns on the blankets. Cautiously, I looked all around. The world was breathing and pulsing with life. And that’s how I knew that nearly half a year of the dead, defeated, hopeless hell they call depression had come to a complete halt.

These are the kind of days I make full use of. Alive days, I call them. I have my share of hope and reason and relative confidence. Sure, my moods veer dramatically to and fro on any day, but generally they waver about within a larger framework of either melancholy or inspiration. Though my black spells can last much longer than six months, this time calling it melancholy was putting it mildly. This last spell was so intensely dark I didn’t know if I would ever believe in anything ever again. It was a crippling grief at betrayal by everything, including my most beloved friends, and my own mind. Everything was dead, including God.

On a day like today, I can handle the burdens of grief I carry for the dead and walk with head high. I can accept the petty feuds that fuel the social circuitry, the misconceptions, the missed connections, and accept them with grace. I can feel my own heartbeat, and know its part of the pulse of the larger puzzle.

On a day like yesterday I was explaining all of this once again to a lady in front of me and to the men behind the mirrors. It makes me laugh how the universal voice of the shrink is sort of calm and breathy. Do you ever hear intrusive thoughts that aren’t your own? they always ask. Voices telling you to hurt others? I do actually chuckle, and they make notes about that. Never, I say. My mania is all mine, when it comes. I tell them I don’t hear voices- I just have a zillion ideas all at once. I start a thousand things and don’t finish them. I thrive, fly, full speed ahead. Most of this is wonderful, except when too many things later end up under an umbrella of “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” It’s all fabulous, except when I appear impatient or distracted and I’m actually really interested. I tell them about the t-shirt my friends wanted to get me: it says, I’m Talking, and I Can’t Shut Up.

That may be, but I didn’t really feel like talking at that particular moment. Sure, I’m ‘working’ on my issues. Always have. It’s just that there are a lot of ‘em. And though I like therapy, I really do, it is an exhausting commitment. And on ‘plateau days’ when I’m normal, and not up or down, I can’t see a great deal of need for it. There’s that feeling that maybe the black dogs won’t come back, and maybe the chaos and flurry of dreams and nightmares won’t come back, either. I can do without the meaningless despair years just fine, thank you very much. And because my thoughts aren’t racing right now, I’ve got some handle on how to get it together from here on in, and don’t want to answer all the questions over and over again, ever again.

Still, the most important part of therapy just might be the group. When you hear the stories of others, you find coping techniques. You compare notes. You make jokes that the world at large might not get.

I killed a few birds with one stone yesterday (what a horrible expression! who wants to kill birds with stones?). I’m committed to not missing therapy appointments, but I used the chance to swing by and visit a friend who’d recently been formed. (To the uninitiated, that means ‘admitted’ or ‘signed in’ or ‘committed.’) Believe me, it’s not the first or the last time I was upstairs in the crazy house. The only surprise is that I’ve only been a visitor. I guess there’s a bright side to this stuff running in the family: you already know you have it, so it doesn’t broadside you in the middle of a normal existence. You never really lose it, because you lost it a long time ago.

So on a day like yesterday, I wasn’t all that surprised to run into a number of old acquaintances at Touched by Fire, an art show presented by the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario. It’s amazing how many coworkers, colleagues, and relatives you run into at various meetings, clinics, and associations. While I’m pretty upfront about my lifelong struggle with depression, being an artist and all that, not everyone else is so vocal. But don’t be surprised: we are everywhere. And last night, we were all at the Gladstone Hotel, where more than forty ‘mentally ill’ artists exhibited a stunning array of painting, sculpture and photography. (I always feel trepidation describing a way of being as a ‘mood disorder’ or an ‘illness’ because in all fairness, it’s those who think the world is running smoothly who are delusional. It’s those who are well adjusted and feel no pain who are possibly sociopathic.)

The Mood Disorders Association of Ontario is an incredible resource for people who experience depression, social anxiety, bipolar disorder, panic disorder, and so on. They are also a resource for families and for professionals. They have ongoing support groups that include peer support, education and self-care, and recreation. They have speakers on mental health, an extensive reference library, campaigns for specific outreach endeavours, and every possible kind of help and hope a person on the brink might need. One amazing feature the MDAO has is www.checkupfromtheneckup.ca, which helps you anonymously determine online whether you might be experiencing any mental health concerns. They also have an annual subway campaign debunking stereotypes and myths about mood disorders. (One of the prominent myths is that mental illness is rare. Don’t kid yourself. Mood disorders are very common and you know all kinds of people who are struggling with them right now.) The MDAO supports a number of paradigms on mental health, and so they offer information about a wide variety of treatments from traditional to alternative. Educate yourself, or find a lifeline by visiting www.mooddisorders.on.ca.

Touched by Fire is an ongoing initiative of the MDAO, “a program to stimulate and celebrate the work created by artists with mood disorders.” It shouldn’t be news to anyone that a world without crazy people would be a world without art. No Van Gogh, no Mozart, no nothin’. After bipolar artist Rebecca Burghardt committed suicide, her father and others in the aftermath sought to build not just “a memorial, but a road forward against mood disorders.” Touched by Fire is an ongoing online exhibition (www.touchedbyfire.ca) and an annual gala that showcases creative contributions by artists with mood challenges.

Closer than she Appears by Susan Strachan Johnson

Last night hundreds of visitors flocked in to see amazing works by artists like Susan Strachan Johnson, Pat Moffatt, Michael Yee, Xenia Vakova, Sunny Crittenden, and more. Of course, I was there for my longtime partner in art crime, Joey DAMMIT! whose influence on my own artwork is obvious to everyone except the blind. He was exhibiting Shirley Temple Black from a show he did about depression called Only Happy When it Rains.

Joey DAMMIT! with one of his favourite works

I have to admit that my fear of crowds nearly caused me to run screaming before entering the sardine-packed room, despite my eagerness to see Joey’s disarming smile. My heart was racing in terror at the sight of zillions of fortysomethings sipping fine wine and the idea of somehow making space for myself among them. Then I thought about the other people who might be terrified to be there. Knowing that tonight I wasn’t the only nutbar in the house made it a little easier to enter, that, and the free wine and guacamole and smoked salmon.

Now Sunny Crittenden was also terrified by the scene. She wrote about her apprehension on her website (www.sunnycrittenden.com). I was immediately drawn to the chaos (and the tampons) in Sunny’s assemblage, Mania in the Key of Psychosis. There was an instant recognition factor in the dense, hurricane layers of ideas and objects. Often I create art with a similar vehemence, a whirlwind of objects and images and textures. Often I create more than one piece at a time- up to 20! But then there are other times when my work is much calmer or streamlined, or slow, depressed, nonexistent.

Viewers of Sunny’s Mania piece were astonished to see the sweet, calm simplicity of her other works. If this isn’t a window into the mind or the mood, nothing is. Sunny said that Mania in the Key of Psychosis was something she made just before a major break with reality- you know, psychosis. It was frantic and urgent, and every little detail inside had a direct emotional significance. She’s only selling the piece because she’s ready to part with that part of herself. It’s a ritual in it’s own way.

I understood right away about the layers of details and their loaded meanings. My own works may seem random, and they are. Yet the most personal ones are endless layers of very significant symbolism. Every word or image in my furious collages might have meaning in my manic universe.

Sunny sure didn’t seem psychotic. A very bubbly and creative young woman- very…well, sunny. On her site she writes very openly about her shyness, her ‘illness’ (remember, I hate to use that word for what is to me just reality. It’s like calling a tidal wave or a volcano an aberration. It’s just nature.) But I know too well how hard it is for other people to think good ol’ fearless Lorette is actually crippled with shyness. You may view me as very open and gregarious. But that’s what wild mood swings are all about. It’s all true. It’s just another part of me.

Mania in the Key of Psychosis by Sunny Crittenden

I was also really taken with Xenia Vakova’s No Public Parking. A simple geometric map painted on found wood, with the title stenciled in. Too bad the piece was already sold! I like maps and shapes, a semblance of order in disorder. Xenia says, “While I was in Halifax, provinces away from friends and family and unable to find a therapist/counsellor, depression hit me in a big way and I was forced to quit school for the time being and return to live with my parents.  During that winter, I continued the series by painting this same map onto a sign I found downtown, which said ‘no public parking.’ It is common for me to start a series and get only through one or two pieces before I lose interest.  Perhaps one day I will return to the shapes of the original map, or make a new one using the same principles.” Xenia’s only 21, and already a veteran of art and of the mind games mood ‘disorders’ play. Her art wouldn’t be the same without them.

No Public Parking by Xenia Vakova

The textures and the kind of storybook-macabre illustration powers in Closer Than She Appears, by Susan Strachan Johnson, were also stunning. A photographer I’d spoken with at length upon arrival

Dragonfly 6 Escher by Ralph Martin

snapped it up. I’d first met Ralph Martin at one of Joey DAMMIT!’s art shows, and I’m blown away by his photography (www.ralphmartinphotography.com). He photographs doors and windows, and close-ups of nature, revealing exquisite patterns and shapes in the world around us.

I was sorry not to run into Pat Moffatt. I was intrigued by the intense light and shadow of his paintings, with thick brush strokes. I will not be the first or last to compare his work to Van Gogh. The subject matter of Pat’s oeuvre is also the momentary landscape, a tree, a flower, perspective of a room. The Canadian Arles. In Moffatt’s statement, he said he worked quickly and intensely until finishing, just like his great teacher.

I wanted to break all the rules of gallery etiquette and touch the paintings. Perhaps a greater writer could better describe the intensity of these works. In that intensity, the rapidness of their completion, the immediacy of the ‘wet-paint’ feeling they evoke, there is tremendous beauty. This is not what I was referred to when I said I woke up three weeks ago and saw colour infused back into patterns, breath inside of life. But it IS what I will see when the scales tip and I start to “go up.” The vibrancy and intensity at that time is so gorgeous that every single pain and grief I’ve borne is worth it, in spades.

The Fishing Shack by Pat Moffatt

There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia!
Jean Dubuffet

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. She is a food writer for Gremolata Magazine, a voracious reader and reviewer, and a dedicated follower of Cosmo Kramer. Visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Our Long Goodbye by Lorette C. Luzajic

Depressed by Lorette C. Luzajic

Against the Wind: reflections of bipolar ‘illness’

Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
-Virginia Woolf

Biology is our nemesis: it dictates everything beautiful and evil in the human race. Our efforts to outsmart it have been clever, coy, and very inventive, giving us what we call ‘culture’ and value so much: you know, art, buildings, law, literature, language and so on, and science, of course, medicine, religion, philosophy, and on it goes. But all of these are still no matches for the innate insistence of the body’s way. Nature trumps all, in the beginning, and in the end. We glimpse this truth even when we say “it runs in the family” and this certainly applies here.

Though I philosophize deeply against reducing my profound disappointment in human life into a medical label, I can’t refute our adamancy to harness and describe those particular chemical components of soul. It’s science: this chemical soup inside our heads and bodies is the physical depiction of this spiritual malaise.

There’s no reduction in calling my life pattern “bipolar.” It’s zero mystery to those around me that my moods veer in extreme ways. The depression world, and then the triumphant rise after a veritable entombment. I’ve always relished the truth that many writers and artists were depressed nutcases: I was pretty sure I was going to grow up and be a writer. So sometimes as a child the history of madness and depression gave me a sense of solidarity.  Call it what you want: most of the creative world is unhinged. In some ways, I feel sorry for artists who flat-line instead of getting their full heritage.

If your depression is bipolar, you get a bit hopeful when the dark cloak of nothingness gives way. You start breathing again. There’s a period of normalizing. It’s nice, brief, and not that familiar. Then you really start feeling amazing. Colours get brighter, and you start feeling the pulse of the mystery instead of thinking it’s all a crap heap. There’s so much flow, and other people’s attitudes don’t bother you as much. You’re super nice and energetic. Work it out, girl. Then you’re off the handle again, and it’s great. Everyone likes you here. No one likes to be in a dark room while you throw back the wine and whine about death. You’re baaaack. And you’re super creative, just like when you’re lowest, but then you’re slowest, and when you’ve got this much energy for creation, it’s a tidal wave. Amazing. You can rise to any challenge. You start a million things and make rapid progress on all kinds of stuff you’ve procrastinated.

Right about here is where you have a shotgun wedding, or shave your head, or date a hot Arab, or take a lot of drugs, and eat candy. If you’re Britney Spears, that is…. Mania’s promises are wicked, devastating, and you can’t see the damage that these impulsive turns can cause. They seem like a good idea at the time. The chaotic makes perfect sense.

I’m so blessed by some of the friendships I have known, and one especially has been my warrior of ‘positivity’, Daniel. His balanced mind and joyful spirit is enviable. Ask him how he is and he’ll sincerely tell you, “I’m LOVING life. And how are you?” Daniel is an amazing and gifted artist, though his true gift is the genuine joy and no-nonsense encouragements and admonishments he doles out. A few weeks ago, after about twenty years of friendship, I told him I finally figured out why he just can’t seem to get into art. It’s puzzled us over the years, because his talent for both painting and music is beyond belief. But the drive to put it together is intermittent, and it feels boring to bother. I realized why, finally- Daniel’s not depressed or crazy. He’s balanced.

Not everyone’s such a good friend, and like you, I’ve had my share of disappointments with people and have ‘trust issues’ and ‘boundary issues.’ It’s profoundly disappointing when people you would and did do everything for find it easier to up and disappear, the coward’s way, instead of coming to someone they care about and telling you what you don’t see. That you aren’t making sane choices, that you don’t see that you’re being vacuumed into crazy places you might not be able to get out if, into a world that will leave you broken hearted or dead. My life was not that much value to this type of friend, evidently. I think we have to be able to tell our loved ones when they might be getting lost. Hard things to say.

Of course there stands the questions: could I have listened? Can you stop a storm from coming? But that’s not the point, really. We have some duty to at least warn a loved one that they can’t see the forecast, try to free them from some extreme pain. A real friend would risk that hope. If a madwoman can be a loyal friend, then what the fuck? Even though you try to arm yourself against the takers, the bipolar person lives with a new slate constantly, hoping, giving benefit of the doubt, assuming it’s a new page. You fully expect others to operate the way you do, with a wide-open heart, because that is all you know.

But you see, the dichotomy of madness is that I couldn’t trade in any of those days now or in the future. I’d love to go back and avoid the addictions and avoid falling in love with people who would die. The pain is unbearable. But other broken people are the ones who loved me, had time for me, gave everything they had to me, and I them. You take what you can get when no one else is offering. Also, in some terrible ways, I thank God no one could stop me, because the times of greatest impulsivity and chaos are also the most creative times. While I’ve grown adept at creating in any mood through sheer discipline, nothing I do according to my organized and structured plans can come close to the output and innovation and sheer body of material and ideas that come out of nowhere. I could not be happier than times of brainstorming, productivity, hurricanes of ideas.

Yes, I’ll do my best to look where I’m going, and armed with hope and confidence and trial and error, I’ll get there. But despite the tsunamis I’m prone to, indeed, because of my risk-taking that nature built into my ‘sick’ brain, I have had an absolutely extraordinary and devastating life, a profound and vivid existence.

I’m grateful for both extremities: mania is a life force. Legend has it that God made the world in seven days, hello. This mythology shows us that the meaning of life itself, the force of it, is wild creation. Depression? It’s the other side of the revelation, for we are dark and horrible in part and depression simply reveals the wounds and the darkness. To live in balance is ideal, yes, even Buddha was striving for complete detachment from the whirling emotions. But no one has completely achieved that, for it is total illusion to think we have healthy, functional families and societies. Who wouldn’t be profoundly depressed by the sickness and malice and greed that fester in this world? Depression is not about ‘poor me’ so much as it is a sane reaction of the sensitive to the injustice of child abuse, rape, cruelty, torture, pollution, extinction, murder, disease. Depression is grief. Depression is a teacher. Another legend has it that a king died on a cross, wrongly accused, and suffered there the torment and abandonment of all that is good. This story is not about one religion being right over another. It was about the humility of depression, about how there is no reward for innocence, about abject grief over a world of darkness.

All this observed, I still thank God that once I thought it was a good idea to fly off in a beige pickup truck and see America. Thank God I have been so loved by some I loved so much. It’s better to have loved and lost. I’m so glad I somehow was inspired to make over 500 pieces of art in my first few years of picking up some art supplies. I’m so glad I spent the last two years starting over seven books and about ten other major projects. Where are they now? You’re right, not everything gets finished. But there are a few hundred thousand words coming at you soon, so get out your wallets.

Do you think I would trade those times in for something a little more even keel? Well, I’m trying…I seek the balance we all seek.

But- I know I can handle everything I’ve thrown at myself, everything thrown at me, and even if I can’t, it’s okay, because the unpredictable winds of the ‘manic depressive’ mind are just a metaphor for the unpredictable volatility of the cosmos.

There are sunny days, rainy days, violent hurricanes that could wipe everything out. Our deepest spiritual malaise is not really mental dis-order. It’s the deepest truth about our nature.

—

What do these names have in common?

Beethoven
Russell Brand
Lord Byron
Sinead O’Connor
Ozzy Osborne
Sylvia Plath
Edgar Allan Poe
Charlie Pride
Nina Simone
Britney Spears
Margaret Trudeau
Mark Twain
Vincent Van Gogh
Kurt Vonnegut
Virginia Woolf
Sir Isaac Newton
Florence Nightingale
Edvard Munch
Vivian Leigh
John Keats
Abbey Hoffman
Herman Hesse
Ernest Hemingway
Peter Gabriel
William Faulkner
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Charles Dickens
Kurt Cobain
Leo Tolstoy
Hans Christian Andersen
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cole Porter
Victor Hugo
Leo Tolstoy
Oscar Wilde
Charles Darwin
Albert Einstein
Tennessee Williams
Albert Einstein
Picasso
Goya
Mozart
Chopin
Bach
Berlioz
Robin Williams
Marshall Mathers (this is me speculating, he is not officially ‘out’ on this list, but come on.)

If you guessed ‘manic depressive’ or ‘bipolar’ you were half-right. All these people are, but that would have been obvious, given my essay. What all of these bipolar personalities have in common is INSANE CREATIVE PRODUCTIVITY.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net