Alvin Ailey, choreographer • Chantal Akerman, filmmaker • Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, astronaut • Alexander the Great, king • Sherman Alexie, writer • Hans Christian Andersen, writer • Ann-Margaret, actress • Adam Ant, musician • Diane Arbus, photographer • Antonin Artaud, writer • Honoré de Balzac, writer • Azealia Banks, rap singer • Samuel Barber, composer • Roseanne Barr, actress • Drew Barrymore, actress • Lionel Barrymore, actor • James Barrie, writer • Rona Barrett, columnist • Charles Baudelaire, poet • Shelley Beattie, athlete/artist • Ned Beatty, actor • Samuel Beckett, writer • Ludwig von Beethoven, composer • Menachem Begin, Israeli head of state • Brendan Behan, poet • Irving Berlin, composer • Hector Berlioz, composer • Leonard Bernstein, composer • John Berryman, poet • William Blake, poet • Charles Bluhdorn, industrialist • Louise Bogan, poet • Ludwig Boltzmann, physicist • Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor • Kjell Magne Bondevik, Norwegian head of state • Robert Boorstin, writer • Clara Bow, actress • Tommy Boyce, musician • Russell Brand, comedian • Marlon Brando, actor • Willy Brandt, German head of state • Richard Brautigan, writer • Jeremy Brett, actor • Rupert Brooke, poet • Van Wyck Brooks, writer • Chris Brown, singer • John Brown, abolitionist • Ruth Brown, singer • Anton Bruckner, composer • Art Buchwald, humorist • John Bunyan, writer • Robert Burns, poet • Robert Burton, writer • Tim Burton, filmmaker • Willie Burton, basketball player • Barbara Bush, former First Lady • Helen Caldicott, activist • Georg Cantor, mathematician • Donald Cammell, screenwriter • Albert Camus, writer • Truman Capote, writer • Drew Carey, comedian • Jim Carrey, actor • Mariah Carrey, singer • Quincy Carter, football player • Dick Cavett, talk-show host • Paul Celan, poet• C. E. Chaffin, writer • Ray Charles, musician • Thomas Chatterton, poet • Paddy Chayefsky, playwright • Lawton Chiles, state governor • Frederic Chopin, composer • Winston Churchill, British head of state • Sandra Cisneros, writer • Eric Clapton, musician • John Clare, poet • Dick Clark, entertainer • Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), writer • John Cleese, actor • Rosemary Clooney, singer • Kurt Cobain, musician • Ty Cobb, baseball player • Leonard Cohen, poet/songwriter • Natalie Cole, singer • Garnet Coleman, state legislator • Samuel Coleridge, poet • Judy Collins, musician, • Shawn Colvin, musician • Joseph Conrad, writer • Pat Conroy, writer • Calvin Coolidge, U.S. president • Francis Ford Coppola, filmmaker • Billy Corgan, musician • Patricia Cornwell, writer • Noel Coward, composer • William Cowper, poet • Hart Crane, writer • Oliver Cromwell, military statesman• Kathy Cronkite, writer • Dennis Crosby, actor • Sheryl Crow, singer • Miley Cyrus, singer • Richard Dadd, artist • John Daly, pro golfer • Rodney Dangerfield, comedian • Bobby Darin, singer • Charles Darwin, scientist • Ray Davies, musician • Thomas De Quincey, poet • Lenny Dee, musician • Sandra Dee, actress • Ellen DeGeneres, comedienne • John Denver, singer • Muffin Spencer Devlin, pro golfer • Diana, Princess of Wales • Paolo DiCanio, soccer player • Charles Dickens, writer • Emily Dickinson, poet • Isak Dinesen, writer • Terence Donovan, photographer • Michael Dorris, writer • Fyodor Dostoevsky, writer • Mike Doughty, musician • Robert Downey, Jr., actor • Jack Dreyfus, hedge-fund manager • Richard Dreyfuss, actor • Patty Duke, actress • Thomas Eagleton, U.S. Senator • Thomas Eakins, artist • Thomas Edison, inventor • Edward Elgar, composer • T.S. Eliot, poet • Elizabeth I, Queen of England • Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer • Florbela Espanca, Portuguese poet • Robert Evans, film producer • James Farmer, civil rights leader • Philo Farnsworth, inventor of television • William Faulkner, writer • Jules Feiffer, cartoonist • Tim Finn, musician • Carrie Fisher, actress • F. Scott Fitzgerald, writer • Alice Flaherty, neurologist • Larry Flynt, publisher • Betty Ford, former First Lady • Harrison Ford, actor • James Forrestal, cabinet member • Stephen Foster, songwriter • Michel Foucault, writer/philosopher • George Fox, Quaker • Connie Francis, entertainer • Albert French, writer • Sigmund Freud, psychiatrist • Brenda Fricker, actress • Stephen Fry, actor • Peter Gabriel, musician • John Kenneth Galbraith, economist • Judy Garland, singer • Alan Garner, writer • James Garner, actor • Rachelle Garniez, songwriter • Paul Gascoigne, soccer player • Paul Gauguin, artist • Harold Geneen, industrialist • Théodore Géricault, artist • George III, King of England • Stan Getz, musician • Kaye Gibbons, writer • Mel Gibson, actor • Mikhail Glinka, composer • Johann Goethe, writer • Nikolai Gogol, writer • Oliver Goldsmith, writer • Dwight Gooden, baseball player • George Gordon (Lord Byron), poet • Tipper Gore, wife of U.S. Vice-President • Arshile Gorky, artist • Francisco de Goya, artist • Phil Graham, publisher • Spalding Gray, performer • Graham Greene, writer • Shecky Greene, comedian • Ivor Gurney, composer/poet • Philip Guston, artist • Halsey, singer • Alexander Hamilton, statesman • Linda Hamilton, actress • Georg Frederich Handel, composer • Pete Harnisch, baseball player • Moss Hart, playwright • Mariette Hartley, actress • Juliana Hatfield, musician • Hampton Hawes, musician • Stephen Hawking, physicist • Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer • Lillian Hellman, playwright • Ernest Hemingway, writer • Margaux Hemingway, actress • Jimi Hendrix, musician • Audrey Hepburn, actress • Herod, Biblical king • Kristin Hersh, musician • Hermann Hesse, writer • Abbie Hoffman, political activist • Friedrich Hölderlin, poet • Gustav Holst, composer • Anthony Hopkins, actor • Gerard Manley Hopkins, poet • Edward Hopper, artist • Howard Hughes, industrialist • Victor Hugo, writer • Henrk Ibsen, playwright • William Inge, playwright • Jack Irons, musician • Charles Ives, composer • Eugene Izzi, writer • Andrew Jackson, U.S. President • Janet Jackson, singer • Jesse Jackson, Jr., politician • Henry James, writer • William James, psychologist • Kay Redfield Jamison, psychologist • Randall Jarrell, poet • Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President • Jim Jensen, news reporter • Jeremiah, Biblical prophet • Joan of Arc, French leader • Job, Biblical figure • Steve Jobs, entrepreneur • Billy Joel, musician • Elton John, musician • Daniel Johns, musician • Samuel Johnson, writer • Daniel Johnston, musician • Ashley Judd, actor • Carl Jung, psychiatrist • Franz Kafka, writer • Karen Kain, ballerina • Chris Kanyon, pro wrestler • Danny Kaye, entertainer • John Keats, poet • Patrick J. Kennedy, U.S. Congressman • Margot Kidder, actress • Larry King, talk-show host • Klaus Kinski, actor • Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, artist • Gelsey Kirkland, dancer • L:incoln Kirstein, writer • Heinrich von Kleist, poet • Otto Klemperer, conductor • Percy Knauth, journalist • Joey Kramer, musician • Kris Kristofferson, singer • Patrick Kroupa, writer/activist • William Kurelek, artist • Pat LaFontaine, hockey player • Charles Lamb, poet • Mary Lambert, songwriter • Jessica Lange, actress • Peter Nolan Lawrence, writer • Edward Lear, poet • Robert E. Lee, U.S. general • Vivian Leigh, actress • John Lennon, musician • Rika Lesser, writer • Oscar Levant, pianist • Jenifer Lewis, actress • Bill Lichtenstein, TV journalist • Abraham Lincoln, U.S. President • Josh Logan, theater director • Jack London, writer • Demi Lovato, singer • Robert Lowell, poet •

The foregoing putative list is woefully incomplete, and not just because it only gets to L. The National Institutes of Health say that “4.4% of adults experience bipolar disorder – who cycle between two or more mood states, such as mania or depression – at some time in their lives,” so I’m talking about somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 million of us, just here in the good old USA.

“Mood-disordered” and potentially lethal, being on the bipolar “spectrum” can be a very bumpy ride. But sometimes it’s as much a gift as a deficit, and does not deserve to be downgraded, degraded, and devalued only as a sign of medical Illness, as though Virginia Woolf, Thelonious Monk, Frank Sinatra, Herman Melville, Little Richard, Bruce Springsteen or Tchaikovsky were all sick, but only when they weren’t being creative.

The bipolar mind, a heightened and deepened sensitivity to whatever is normally hidden from view. And which necessarily involves risk-taking. Go past the known to unfamiliar places, try something untried, entertain new possibilities – to Emerson, “Every wall is a door.” Some of the time, maybe even most, you’ll come up empty-handed, or even go off the deep end, where the dragons live. But the road of excess, according to one of the better-known members of the club, may sometimes lead to a palace.

In the prevailing “medical model,” bipolarity has no biological test and no “cure,” It’s only a list of symptoms, to be controlled and suppressed through a scattershot application of complex and expensive drug regimens.

All have potentially devastating “side” effects that only get worse the longer you’re on them – and no one has been able to provide any clear proof of the basic hypothesis behind all of them, that the fundamental cause is some chemical “imbalance” in the brain, like the imbalance of insulin in the pancreas that causes diabetes.

But even if such were the case, is this the cause, or do the pills themselves cause further imbalances that require ever more concoctions to smooth out the ride? The feedback loops spiral while Big Pharma gets fat.

And if the cause is genetic, one may assume mental “illness” even confers some evolutionary benefit, else why are so many of us nutjobs still around? And guess what, here’s something I read in The NY Times suggesting precisely that:

“Studies on the role of genes… suggest immune involvement, a finding that helps to resolve an old puzzle. People with schizophrenia tend not to have many children. So how have the genes that increase the risk of schizophrenia… persisted in populations over time? One possibility is that we retain genes that might increase the risk… because those genes helped humans fight off pathogens. Some psychiatric illness may be an inadvertent consequence… of having an aggressive immune system.”

In other words, mental “disorders” may arise from a genetic disruption to networks that allow us to distinguish between things that are generated by our self and things that belong to our external world. An auto-immune response, producing antibodies that not only fight infections, but turn on your own body as well. With the result, for example, that you have difficulty telling real voices from the ones yelling at you in your head.

So perhaps what is called mental “illness” is something far more complex. And not merely some intricate Rube Goldberg contraption – a sort of Self-Operating Napkin that has broken down and can no longer clean up after itself. But which can be disassembled (“reverse-engineered”), then put back again from scratch, like a car in need of a total overhaul in the garage, but without the faintest understanding of how and why it all goes together after so many millions of years of becoming.

I am more than a Machine, or just the sum of my parts. And so are you. Everyone is, possibly even Donald tRump. And not just The Donald, but Donald Duck too, and all creatures great and small. And the grass and the trees and even the stones and… All of it evolving together, dependent on each other, on everything that has gone before, and everything that will come after, a single infinitely complex whole, however many pieces are in the puzzle.

No one an island, no island disconnected from all the rest. One big club, all of us members.