Pregnancy and Bipolar Disorder

Salon.com has a great essay by Maud Casey about the author's consideration of whether or not to have a child.  A description of "Madness, medication and motherhood:"

I have bipolar disorder. I want a child, but I am terrified of going off my meds — and of birth defects. Do I dare trust this body to create another one?

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Schizophrenia and the Art of Louis Wain

This is ancient news in a the blogosphere, posted in late February by Neatorama but I didn't have a blog yet plus I think its cool so I'm writing about it anyways.

A Cornell student's project "Schizophrenia, Aging and Art" includes a section about the artist Louis Wain born in 1860 and a victim of late onset Schizophrenia. He drew cats in fanciful situations for newspapers and children's books. From the Cornell page:

During the onset of his disease at 57, Wain continued to paint, draw and sketch cats, but the focus changed from fanciful situations, to focus on the cats themselves.

Characteristic changes in the art began to occur, changes common to schizophrenic artists. Jagged lines of bright color began emanating from his feline subjects. The outlines of the cats became sever and spiky, and their outlines persisted well throughout the sketches, as if they were throwing off energy.

Soon the cats became abstracted, seeming now to be made up of hundreds of small repetitive shapes, coming together in a clashing jangles of color that transform the cat into something resembling an Eastern deity.

The abstraction continued, the cats now being seen as made up by small repeating patterns, almost fractal in nature. Until finally they ceased to resemble cats at all, and became the ultimate abstraction, an indistinct form made up by near symmetrical repeating patterns.

BoingBoing.net posted about this shortly after Neatorama's post and they recieved a response from researcher Mark Pilkington that suggested that the drawings (all undated) were only later assembled to suggest the influence of Schizophrenia.

But think the drawings are fascinating, regardless.