Famous People Articles
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"How lovely yellow is!" - Vincent Van Gogh |
Knowledge is Necessity. Virginia Woolf's body fished out of the water, weighted down by stones. Van Gogh cradled in the arms of his brother at age 37, a thousand Starry Nights never to be painted, Sylvia Plath with the gas on and her kids in the next room, Marilyn Monroe found in a state of partial rigor mortis, forever young. These are tragic pictures of brilliant lives cut short.
But we also include people who led very successful lives, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt ...
The purpose of this section is to gain insight into the gift and curse that is our illness. We truly have wings, but beware of the melting wax.
Also on display are some heroes and one villain of psychiatry. Their stories chronicle how our understanding of human nature and the mind has changed over the years - and is still changing. Only by studying the past can we make intelligent guesses about where our thinking may be headed.
More famous people - Newton, Einstein, Byron, etc - can be found in an article on creativity in the Behavior section. But you are here right now. Jump in wherever you like ...
The pic to illustrate Famous is a section from one of Warhol's "Marilyn" prints. Marilyn's iconic status made her a no-brainer to lead the parade of notables chronicled here. Warhol's recasting of the same image in different shades suggests that what you see is not necessarily what you get.
Brilliant Lives Cut Short
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Marilyn - Something Had to Give There's been no one like her, before or since. |
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Reflections on the artist and his madness. |
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Tchaikovsky - Music of the Heart His depression was responsible for his final work. |
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The thought of her going under one more time was more than she could take. |
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Sylvia Plath - In Her Own Words Long a silent party in the discussion, now her voice is being heard. |
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Meriwether Lewis - Murder or Suicide? This historical whodunnit is actually pretty straightforward. |
Transcendent, Visionary, Heroic, Depressed
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His unremitting despair and long string of failures steeled his character. |
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Liszt and Chopin - Piano Forte As well as the piano, these two had depression in common. |
The Sound and the Fury
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Beethoven - In a Major and Minor Mood His life could fill up a segment on Oprah. |
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Mahler - The Man Who Saw It Coming His music chronicled a doomed era unraveling. |
On the Wacky and Wild Side
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Columbus, Hamilton, Carnegie, Venter, Mayer, and others. |
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A certain manic energy drives their work. |
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Their vision and exuberance saved the nation's natural treasures. |
Two American Tragedies
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He was on the cusp of greatness. Two years later ... |
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Phil Ochs - An American Tragedy The 60s did not end as anyone had imagined, but Phil took it personally. |
Call Them Disturbed
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His bipolar is well-documented, but what else was going on? |
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Musings on the artist Jackson Pollock. |
Gallery of Psychiatrists
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The cult of Freud nearly wrecked psychiatry. A reappraisal may save it. |
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Accused of lapsing into mysticism, in retrospect Jung is more grounded than Freud. |
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His 1921 opus is way ahead of the psychiatry of today. |
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Walter Freeman - Father of the Lobotomy Thinking of giving someone a piece of your mind? Steer clear of this guy. |
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The most influential psychiatrist you never heard of. |
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If you want to know what is really going on, you need to listen to this guy. |
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With his lab partner, the humble sea snail, he cracked open the neuron. |
