A Literary Prescription for

Bipolar Disorder

For the highs that feel like flight and the lows that feel like drowning — and the writers who have mapped the whole terrain and come back to tell it.

Bipolar disorder is a real, lifelong, treatable condition, not a matter of moodiness or a failure of will. It moves between episodes of mania or hypomania and episodes of depression, and living well with it is usually the patient work of years — medication, routine, self-knowledge, and people who understand. The books, poems and words gathered here come from people who have lived it from the inside, honest about both the seduction of the heights and the true cost of the depths.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Memoirs by people who have lived bipolar disorder from the inside, a clinician’s steadying guide, and a novel that holds the whole family in frame.

An Unquiet Mind

Kay Redfield Jamison · 1995

Jamison is a clinical psychologist who has spent her career studying mood disorders — and who has lived with bipolar disorder herself since adolescence. Her memoir is unmatched for the way it holds both truths at once: the intoxicating pull of mania and the devastation that follows, written with the precision of a scientist and the candour of someone who nearly did not survive it.

Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me

Ellen Forney · 2012

A graphic memoir about Forney’s diagnosis and her fear that treatment would flatten the very creativity she prized. Funny, frank and visually inventive, it is especially good company for anyone wrestling with the “will medication change who I am?” question that so many people face at the start.

Madness: A Bipolar Life

Marya Hornbacher · 2008

Hornbacher writes about a life shaped by rapid-cycling bipolar disorder with unflinching honesty and real literary force. It is not a gentle book, but for readers who feel their own experience has been sanded down into something too neat, its refusal to tidy things up can feel like the truth finally being told.

Haldol and Hyacinths

Melody Moezzi · 2013

A vivid, often very funny memoir of bipolar disorder written from the perspective of an Iranian-American Muslim woman — weaving in family, faith and identity in a way few illness memoirs do. Moezzi is warm and defiant company, and her book widens the picture of who bipolar disorder happens to.

The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide

David J. Miklowitz · 2019

The practical companion to the memoirs: a clear, trustworthy guide to what bipolar disorder actually is and how to live with it — recognising early warning signs, working with medication, protecting sleep and routine, and involving the people around you. A steadying reference to return to between episodes, not only during them.

Everything Here Is Beautiful

Mira T. Lee · 2018

A novel that follows two sisters across years and continents as one of them lives with serious mental illness. Lee resists easy answers, holding the love, the exhaustion and the limits of what family can do all at once. For readers who want to feel less alone through story rather than instruction, it is quietly devastating and deeply humane.

Poems about bipolar disorder

For when prose is not enough

Poems for the heights, the depths, and the strange clarity that can come from having known both.

“Much Madness is divinest Sense”

Emily Dickinson, c.1862

Much Madness is divinest Sense—
To a discerning Eye—
Much Sense—the starkest Madness—

Dickinson’s tight, defiant little poem argues that the line between sanity and madness is drawn less by truth than by majority opinion. For anyone whose mind runs at a different pitch to the people around them, it offers something bracing: not comfort exactly, but recognition, and a refusal to accept that difference means deficiency.

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“No worst, there is none”

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1885

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

One of Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets”, written from inside a despair so complete he could barely name it. For the depressive pole of bipolar disorder — the weeks when the floor keeps dropping — few poems go so far down and still, somehow, make something enduring out of the descent.

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“Her Kind”

Anne Sexton, 1960

I have been her kind.

Sexton’s poem moves through a series of outcast, “possessed” women — the witch, the misfit, the one who has been misunderstood — and claims every one of them with its returning refrain. For anyone set apart by the swings of their own mind, it turns shame into something closer to fierce belonging. (Only the refrain is quoted here; follow the link to read the whole poem.)

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about bipolar disorder to keep

For the days at either pole, and the ordinary ones in between that are their own quiet achievement.

I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that.

Carrie Fisher

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There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness.

Kay Redfield Jamison

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You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you.

Dan Millman

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What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candour, and more unashamed conversation.

Glenn Close

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You are allowed to be both a masterpiece and a work in progress simultaneously.

Sophia Bush

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From Georgia

Pause here, if you need to

A short practice for steadying yourself, whenever the ground feels like it is moving.

Self-Compassion Meditation: A Meditation For Inner Peace

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare · Insight Timer

A tender meditation on speaking to yourself the way you would to someone you love, offered as an act of quiet self-kindness.

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The Inner Peace Toolkit

Digital Self-Care Toolkit · Georgia Clare

2 guided meditations, an Inner Peace Journal, an affirmations eBook, 10 printable affirmation prints and 10 calming phone wallpapers — small daily practices to come back to whenever you need to slow down and reconnect with yourself.

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The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice — gently softening how you meet stress, anxiety and overwhelm, one day at a time.

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Questions people ask

Reading for Bipolar Disorder

Where should I start?

If you only read one thing, begin with An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison. She is a leading expert on mood disorders who also lives with bipolar disorder, and her memoir manages to be both clinically precise and profoundly human. And if a whole book feels like too much today, scroll to the poems below — Emily Dickinson’s “Much Madness is divinest Sense” can be read in under a minute and asks nothing of you.

What can I read when bipolar disorder makes it hard to concentrate?

Start with the short forms on this page — the poems and the lines to keep — rather than a whole book. A poem or a single quote asks very little of you, and you do not have to read in order, or finish anything. On a low day, one held line is enough.

What are some good quotes about bipolar disorder?

Quotes about bipolar disorder worth keeping include “I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that.” (Carrie Fisher), “There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness.” (Kay Redfield Jamison) and “What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candour, and more unashamed conversation.” (Glenn Close). You will find these and more in the quotes section above.

Why read when you’re living with bipolar disorder?

Because it helps you feel less alone. The writers here have lived through bipolar disorder themselves, and reading them is a little like being handed a map by someone who has walked the same ground — not a cure, but company, and proof that this has been felt, and steadied, and survived before.

Bipolar Disorder

Prescribed reading

For when prose is not enough

Quotes about bipolar disorder to keep

Pause here, if you need to

Reading for Bipolar Disorder

Where should I start?

What can I read when bipolar disorder makes it hard to concentrate?

What are some good quotes about bipolar disorder?

Why read when you’re living with bipolar disorder?

More prescriptions await.