Famous People with Depressive Disorders

Writers

• Hans Christian Andersen
• Honore de Balzac
• James Barrie
• Arthur Benson (H)
• E.F. Benson
• James Boswell
• William Faulkner (H)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald (H)
• Lewis Grassic Gibbon (SA)
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman (H, S)
• Nikolai Gogl
• Maxim Gorky (SA)
• Kenneth Graham
• Graham Greene
• Ernest Hemingway (H, S)
• Henrik Ibsen
• William Inge (H, S)
• Henry James
• William James
• Charles Lamb (H)
• Malcolm Lowry (H, S)
• John Bunyan
• Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
• Joseph Conrad (SA)
• Charles Dickens
• Isak Dinesen (SA)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Herman Melville
• Eugene O'Neill (H, SA)
• Francis Parkman
• John Ruskin (H)
• Mary Shelley
• Jean Stafford (H)
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• August Strindberg
• Leo Tolstoy
• Ivan Turgenev
• Tennessee Williams (H)
• Mary Wollstonecraft (SA)
• Virginia Woolf (H, S)
• Emile Zola

Composers

• Anton Arensky
• Hector Berlioz (SA)
• Anton Bruckner (H)
• Jeremiah Clarke (S)
• John Dowland
• Edward Elgar
• Carlo Gesualdo
• Mikhail Glinka
• George Frederic Handel
• Gustav Holst
• Charles Ives
• Otto Klemperer (H)
• Orlando de Lassus
• Gustav Mahler
• Modest Mussorgsky
• Sergey Rachmaninoff
• Giocchino Rossini
• Robert Schumann (H, SA)
• Alexander Scriagbin
• Peter Tchaikovsky
• Peter Warlock (S)
• Hugo Wolf (H, SA)
• Bernd Alois Zimmerman (S)

Nonclassical Music

• Irving Berlin (H)
• Noel Coward
• Stephen Foster
• Charles Parker (H, SA)
• Cole Porter (H)
• Charles Mingus (H)
• Bud Powell (H)
• Kurt Cobain, musician (Nirvana) (S 1994)

Poets

• 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)
• Samuel Johnson
• John Keats
• 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)
• Osip Mandelstam (H, SA)
• Louis MacNeice
• James Clarence Mangan
• 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 (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

Artists

• Ralph Barton (S)
• Francesco Bassano (S)
• Ralph Blakelock (H)
• David Bomberg
• Francesco Borromini (S)
• John Sell Cotman
• Richard Dadd (H)
• Edward Dayes (S)
• Thomas Eakins
• Paul Gauguin (SA)
• Theodore Gericault
• Hugo van der Goes
• Vincent van Gogh (H, S)
• Arshile Gorky (S)
• Philip Guston (H)
• Benjamin Haydon (S)
• Carl Hill (H)
• Ernst Josephson (H)
• George Innes (SA)
• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (H, S)

This list is taken from Kay Jamison's Touched With Fire; Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.
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."