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.

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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.

“We Wear the Mask”

Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1895

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Dunbar wrote about the effort of holding a composed, smiling face to the world while something far harder goes on beneath it. For anyone managing bipolar disorder — especially through the depressive stretches spent ‘passing’ as fine — the poem names that daily performance, and the quiet exhaustion of keeping it up.

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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.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing—
Then lull, then leave off.

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 gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
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. Find it in To Bedlam and Part Way Back.

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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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Everything is going to be OK. Maybe not now, but eventually.

Matt Haig

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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.

When Everything Feels Too Much

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A soft place to land on the days the world is simply too loud — no fixing, just a little room to breathe.

Listen Now For Free

Healing Doesn’t End. It Deepens.

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On why healing isn’t a finish line you cross once, but something that keeps deepening — gentler company for the long haul.

Read the Essay →

Calm Your Nervous System When You Feel Overwhelmed

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A grounding practice for the moments when feelings surge and the body won’t settle — a way back to steady ground.

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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.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Bipolar Disorder

Where should I start with bipolar disorder?

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 — Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” 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 with bipolar disorder?

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.