To celebrate the release of "Saint Jude" on Kindle, Carraway Bay Press will list some of our favorite books, fiction and non-fiction, that deal with mental illnesses.

While there is always a lot of speculation about famous people who may / may not have had bipolar disorder, and there are tons of lists out there on the Internet, I put my stock in the resources from "Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament" by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison. She is a prominent psychiatrist and leader in the field of mental health research. [I highly recommend that book, along with her autobiography, "An Unquiet Mind"

This is what she says in the opening of her book:
In Appendix B: Writers, Artists, and Composers with Probable Cyclothymia, Major Depression, or Manic-Depressive Illness.

"This is meant to be an illustrative rather than a comprehensive list; for systematic studies, see text. Most of the writers, composers, and artists are American, British, European, Irish, or Russian; all are deceased . . . Many if not most of these writers, artists, and composers had other major problems as well, such as medical illnesses, alcoholism or drug addiction, or exceptionally difficult life circumstances. They are listed here as having suffered from a mood disorder because their mood symptoms predated their other conditions, because the nature and course of their mood and behavior symptoms were consistent with a diagnosis of an independently existing affective illness, and/or because their family histories of depression, manic-depressive illness, and suicide--coupled with their own symptoms--were sufficiently strong to warrant their inclusion."

And now the poets-----[NOTE: Links may not be active]
KEY:

    H = Asylum or psychiatric hospital
    S = Suicide
    SA = Suicide attempt

Antonin Artaud (H)

Konstantin Batyushkov (H, SA)

Charles Baudelaire (SA)

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (S)

John Berryman (H, S)

William Blake

Aleksandr Blok

Barcroft Boake (S)

Louis Bogan (H)

Rupert Brooke

Robert Burns

George Gordon, Lord Byron

Thomas Campbell

Paul Celan (S)

Thomas Chatterton (S)

John Clare (H)

Harley Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

William Collins (H)

William Cowper (H, SA)

Hart Crane (S)

George Darley

John Davidson (S)

Emily Dickinson - more

Ernest Dowson

T.S. Eliot (H)

Sergey Esenin (S)

Robert Fergusson (H)

Afanasy Fet (SA)

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

Edward FitzGerald

John Gould Fletcher (S)

Gustaf Froding (SA, H)

Oliver Goldsmith

Adam Lindsay Gordon (S)

Thomas Gray

Nikolai Gumilyov (SA)

Robert Stephen Hawker

Friedrich Holderlin (H)

Gerard Manley Hopkins - More

Victor Hugo

Randal Jarrell (H, S)

Samuel Johnson

John Keats - More

Henry Kendall (H)

Velimir Khlebnikov (H)

Heinrich Von Kleist (S)

Walter Savage Landor

Nikolaus Lenau (H)

J.M.R. Lenz (SA)

Mikhail Lermontov

Vachel Lindsay (S)

James Russell Lowell

Robert Lowell (H)

Hugh MacDiarmid (H)

Louis MacNeice

Osip Mandelstam (H, SA)

James Clarence Mangan

Vladimir Mayakovsky (S)

Edna St. Vincent Millay (H)

Alfred de Musset

Gerard de Nerval (H, S)

Boris Pasternak (H)

Cesare Pavese (S)

Sylvia Plath (H, S)

Edgar Allan Poe (SA)

Ezra Pound (H)

Alexander Pushkin

Laura Riding (SA)

Theodore Roethke (H)

Delmore Schwartz (H)

Anne Sexton (H, S)

Percy Bysshe Shelley - More (SA)

Christopher Smart (H)

Torquato Tasso (H)

Sara Teasdale (H, S)

Alfred, Lord tennyson

Dylan Thomas

Edward Thomas

Francis Thompson

George Trakl (H, S)

Marina Tsvetayeva (S)

Walt Whitman