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Kay Redfield Jamison, PhD
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Baltimore, Md

Richard Jed Wyatt, MD
National Institute of Mental Health Washington, DC

JAMA. 1991;265(6):723-724.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

We have discussed elsewhere the compelling evidence for a diagnosis of manic-depressive illness, including the nature of van Gogh's psychiatric symptoms (extreme mood changes, including long periods of despair and extended episodes of highly active, volatile and exalted states, altered sleep patterns, hyperreligiosity, extreme irritability, visual and auditory hallucinations, violence, agitation, and substance abuse), the age of onset of his symptoms, his premorbid personality, the episodic nature of his attacks, which were interspersed with long periods of highly lucid functioning, the lack of cognitive deterioration over time, the increasing severity of his mood swings, seasonal exacerbations in his symptoms and patterns of productivity, and his striking family history for suicide and psychiatric illness (his brother Theo suffered from recurrent depressions and became psychotic at the end of his life, his sister Wilhelmina spent 40 years in an insane asylum with a "chronic psychosis," and his younger brother . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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