ADHD & Bipolar Celebrities Does It Make Them More Creative?

Up to 10 million American adults have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—also commonly referred to as ADD—so it's no surprise that some of America's most acclaimed athletes, actors, and musicians make up part of that mix. Left untreated, the disorder is characterized by poor concentration and disorganization, and can lead to emotional and social problems.

About 60% of children diagnosed with ADHD will continue to experience these symptoms well into adulthood. And some people with the disorder don't receive an official diagnosis until middle age.

See which celebs have suffered with an ADHD diagnosis since childhood, and which have learned to manage their disorder as adults.

Michael Phelps
The 23-year-old Olympic swimming sensation is famous for his incredible focus in the pool, so it's hard to believe he has struggled with ADHD since childhood. His teachers complained about his inability to sit still until, in fifth grade, the Phelps' family physician formally diagnosed him with ADHD. At age 9, Phelps went on Ritalin; his mother, Debbie, later recalled in the New York Times that it seemed to help his hyperactivity. After two years on medication, however, Phelps said he felt stigmatized (each day at lunchtime he had to visit the school nurse to get his medicine) and asked to be taken off the drug. After consulting with his doctor, Debbie agreed to let him be med free.

Instead, Phelps used swimming to help him find focus. In fact, many children with ADHD benefit from competitive sports. "I'm just different in the water," Phelps told Sports Illustrated. "I just feel at home in it." (Related story: Could Phelps' marijuana incident be linked to ADHD

Solange Knowles
The soulful songstress says she's always been full of energy, and claims that sometimes her sporadic speech and effervescence led people to believe she was on drugs. The real culprit? ADHD.

Knowles, whose older sister is the popular singer and actress Beyoncé, said she was diagnosed with the disorder twice before she believed it. "I didn't believe the first doctor who told me," she has said. "I guess I was in denial."

Traditionally, ADHD was thought to be a male-oriented disease, and men were once believed to account for the vast majority of cases. But recent research has begun to focus on how the disorder affects females, so that ADHD may be identified earlier in women’s lives.

Ty Pennington
The energetic and upbeat star of ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition said he was “uncontrollable” as a child unless he had a crayon and piece of paper in hand. Pennington, 44, earned poor marks throughout high school and college, until he was diagnosed with ADHD as an undergrad. He's now a spokesperson for Shire, a pharmaceutical company that manufactures adult ADHD drugs.

"I'm about as ADHD as you can get," Pennington told InStyle magazine. He went on medication following his diagnosis and saw an instant improvement in his schoolwork. "I immediately stared getting straight A's. It changed my life!"

Howie Mandel
The Deal or No Deal host is calm and collected during his super-hyped game show, but ADHD made him impulsive and unfocused well into adulthood, when he finally got a formal diagnosis.

A penchant for pranks got Mandel expelled from high school, and he continued to struggle with his attention span for the next 20 years before his doctor finally gave him an ADHD diagnosis. "I found it difficult to sit down and read a script for work, or even have a conversation," says Mandel, 53.

James Carville
The political pundit and consultant is widely credited with helping Bill Clinton win the 1992 presidential election, but he wasn't always so focused. In fact, Carville, 64, initially flunked out of college.

He later went back to earn his bachelor's degree before going on to graduate from law school. Carville has said that he found his razor-sharp focus for politics because of its fast-paced and ever-changing nature. In 2007, Carville was a featured guest at the CHADD (Children and Adults With Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) 20th Anniversary Hall of Fame Conference

Christopher Knight
Playing pint-size Peter on the original Brady Bunch television series, Knight, 51, had a hard time learning his lines. Finally, in 1997, he was diagnosed with ADHD. He sought treatment to help manage his condition and served as a spokesperson for the National Consumer League's AD/HD campaign.

Cammi Granato
She helped lead her team to gold as the captain of the U.S. women's ice hockey team at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan—and she credits her ADHD with helping her get that far. Granato, 37, claims that constantly feeling restless contributed to her drive on ice.

ADHD makes everyday tasks such as paying bills more difficult for Granato, but the energy and creativity associated with the disorder have helped in her sport. “It’s affected me in positive and negative ways,” Granato told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2005. “It’s really my worst and best qualities wrapped in one.”

The creative curse
Depression may have been dubbed the “common cold of mental health,” but the mental health buzzword these days is bipolar disorder, possibly because it's often associated with creativity, verve, and charisma. Sometimes called manic depression, the disorder affects about 2.5% of the adult U.S. population and can cause extreme mood changes—from manic episodes of very high energy to extreme lows of depression. Bipolar disorder is difficult to diagnose, even for the experts; that may explain why the media feel free to invoke the disorder in the wake of a celebrity’s erratic behavior or substance abuse. While some celebs have been outspoken about their struggles with bipolar disorder, others allude mysteriously to manic depression. Here, see which celebrities, past and present, have been linked to bipolar

Britney Spears
While the pop princess, 26, is keeping quiet about possible mental health problems, speculation and rumors about a possible bipolar diagnosis have swirled around Spears since the infamous shaved-head photos surfaced. A parade of psychiatrists and psychologists—none of whom have actually treated Spears, mind you—have “diagnosed” her as bipolar in various media outlets. “Her erratic behavior has moved into bipolar disorder,” psychologist Robert Butterworth said in a 2007 interview with Us Weekly online, for instance. A January 2008 People magazine cover story about Spears referred to “a likely bipolar disorder,” and in it, a Santa Monica, Calif.–based psychiatrist said Spears’s actions suggested “classic bipolar behavior, including hypersexuality, poor judgment, and impulsivity.” Whatever mental health condition Spears may (or may not) be suffering from, a new hit single suggests that the beleaguered singer has regained her footing.

Kurt Cobain
The grunge rocker took his own life at age 27 despite the success of his Seattle–based band, Nirvana. Noting that one of the band’s songs is titled “Lithium,” which is also a mood stabilizer used in the treatment of bipolar disorder, Time magazine included him in a 2002 list of “manic geniuses” who made great contributions to music, art, or literature and who may have had bipolar disorder.

Marilyn Monroe
Many of the questions surrounding the actress’s life and death are still unanswered—and are likely to remain that way. But Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days, a 2001 documentary, shed some light on her drug use and mental health. “We knew that she was a manic depressive,” Monroe’s physician, Hyman Engelberg, MD, says in the film. “That always meant that there were emotional problems and that she could have big swings in her moods.” (You can watch clips of the film.)

Sinead O'Connor
The pop star of the eighties and nineties, notorious for her shaved head, openly discussed her mental illness on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007. She said she was diagnosed as bipolar at age 37, after attempting to kill herself on her 33rd birthday. O’Connor, now 41, said she takes antidepressants and mood stabilizers. “Anything is an improvement when you've been in desolation,” O’Connor told Winfrey of the meds, but “it doesn't mean you don't have lumps and bumps."

Vincent van Gogh
The painter suffered from incredible highs and lows throughout his apparent struggle with mental illness. During his lifetime, van Gogh’s disease wouldn’t have been known as bipolar disorder, but today the symptoms are clearly recognizable. “When van Gogh's health and spirits were up, he painted with confidence and energy amounting almost to fury,” a Washington Post art critic wrote in 1998. “When he was down...he was virtually paralyzed with doubt and fear.”

Carrie Fisher
Actress Fisher, 52, best known for her role as Princess Leia in the Star Wars trilogy, has experienced plenty of turbulence in her life—and not just aboard the Millennium Falcon. After years of struggling with mania and depression, Fisher was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was 28. Fisher told USA Today in 2002 that she now leads a normal life and her behavior is much more predictable, thanks to the lithium prescribed by her doctor. But it wasn’t always so easy. “I hacked off my hair, got a tattoo, and wanted to convert to Judaism," she said of her most recent manic episode

Emily Dickinson
This introverted poet’s work is often dark and gloomy. While it is impossible to know for sure if her mental illness would have been classified as bipolar disorder today, a 2001 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry that examined cycles in Dickinson’s productivity suggests that may be the case. Dickinson’s doctor diagnosed her with “nervous prostration,” which, according to the study’s author, psychiatrist John F. McDermott, MD, was “characterized by anxiety and depression.” In Dickinson’s time, physicians had not yet identified bipolar disorder as such, but, Dr. McDermott notes, Dickinson’s writing patterns are “not inconsistent” with the symptom profile of the disorder.

Virginia Woolf
The dark diaries and letters of Woolf, who suffered four major breakdowns before drowning herself at age 59, have convinced numerous scholars that the writer must have had manic-depressive illness. According to a 2004 article by psychologist Katherine Dalsimer, the “mood swings from severe depression to manic excitement and episodes of psychosis” that Woolf experienced would be diagnosed as bipolar today.

Linda Hamilton
In a 2004 interview, the 52-year-old actress of Terminator fame revealed that she had been living with bipolar disorder for more than 20 years. She was finally diagnosed after 10 years of “amazingly brilliant” manic highs, and lows that felt “like falling into a manhole and not being able to climb out no matter what.” Hamilton decided to tell the public about her struggle 10 years after her diagnosis, when she had the disorder under control. “My quality of life is more amazing than I ever could’ve imagined in those 20 years of struggling with illness,” she said.