finally...
Vivien Leigh...all the beauty and twice the crazy.
That sounded callous. Sorry.
Vivien Leigh suffered from bipolarity and was prone to episodes of psychosis. By accounts she could manage it courageously until the psychosis set in, and even so she somehow managed to inspire even people she'd badly wronged to care for and protect her.
My brother is a Type 1 Bipolar, and it is a common pattern among siblings that if one is Type 1, one of the others will be a Cyclothymic. Guess who won that lottery?
Cyclothymia is a "milder" form of bipolarity, in which there are long periods of slight elevation, punctuated by short, sharp plummets into the black hole of depression. My therapist once likened it to walking around for weeks always with two martinis in me, and then a cumulative hangover sets in for a day.
I was in my forties before it was diagnosed. But it made life hell for my wife two or three times a year for twenty years.
So, anyway, I really wasn't mocking Vivien Leigh.
