Sylvia Plath - Famous Bipolar
Posted by Administrator in Mental Health.The glamour brought about by Sylvia Plath’s suicide overshadows much of her work, a glamour that has made her a sort of heroine for her fans and a poet damned by a murderous art for her critics. Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932. She grew up comfortably in middle-class style and attended Smith College.
Though Plath appeared to be a carefree student who was the envy of many young women, she silently struggled with the monsters of mental illness. In her senior year she won Mademoiselle magazine’s fiction contest and was awarded two Smith Poetry Prizes.
In addition to these accolades, she was chosen to be guest editor of Mademoiselle’s College Board Contest. In the midst of her early success, Plath experienced her first breakdown and famous disappearance. She was subsequently hospitalized and treated with shock therapy.
Plath described the hospitalization as “[a] time of darkness, despair, and disillusion—so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be—symbolic death, and numb shock—then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration.” This was followed by a suicide attempt in 1953 and six months of intensive therapy, paid for by a benefactress. Read more