The stigma around bipolar disorder, which is marked by extreme mood swings between highs (mania) and lows (depression), leads many people with this mental illness to keep it a secret. But the isolation and loneliness this creates can pose their own challenges.
The famous men and women here have broken the silence and
spoken out, fostering conversations about what it’s really like to have bipolar disorder. They are among the estimated 4.4 percent of Americans who will experience bipolar disorder at some time in their lives.
A child star turned pop culture icon, Selena Gomez, 33, revealed in 2020 that she has bipolar disorder.
“Recently I went to one of the best mental health hospitals in America, McLean Hospital, and I discussed that after years of going through a lot of different things, I realized I was bipolar,” Gomez told Miley Cyrus during an Instagram Live interview. “So when I know more information, it actually helps me. It doesn’t scare me when I know it.”
Gomez was the subject of a 2022 documentary,
Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, that followed her career over six years, revealing her life with bipolar disorder as well as the autoimmune disease
lupus. In an interview about the film, she discussed her efforts to “make bipolar her friend” through various methods, including trusting in a “force that’s bigger.”
Gomez cofounded the digital platform Wondermind in 2021 with the goal of sharing “easy, doable ways to put your mental fitness first, every day.”
Actor Linda Hamilton, 69, best known for her iconic turn as Sarah Connor in the
Terminator franchise and her role in
Stranger Things, has spoken openly for decades about bipolar disorder and depression, and her early use of drugs and alcohol to self-medicate.
Hamilton estimates that she had “20 full years of symptoms, not counting my childhood, from 20 to 40. I call them my lost years,” she said in a 2004 interview with AP Radio.
She didn’t know why she had intense mood swings. Her first husband, actor Bruce Abbott, “said you have the most incredible joy and the most incredible sorrow that goes with it. Without giving it a name, he had pretty much summed it up for me,” she said.
In a 2025 interview with
People, Hamilton said she’s now in a solid place. “I have found just true balance and steadiness in my day and in my life. And I also can activate all of the safeguards that I learned from 20 years of therapy,” she said. “People just can’t give up on themselves. That’s the thing. It’s just, keep looking until you find your way through it. I’m living proof that it can be done. And I was a hot mess for the first 40 years.”
Ye (previously known as Kanye West), 48, is widely considered one of the most influential musical artists of our time. On his 2018 album,
Ye, he rapped about having bipolar disorder, calling it his “superpower” and claiming that it “Ain’t no disability, I’m a superhero.” Text on the album cover reads, “I hate being bipolar it’s awesome.”
In a 2019 interview with David Letterman, Ye elaborated on the hard parts of life with bipolar. “If someone has a sprained ankle, you’re not going to push on him more. With us, once our brain gets to a point of spraining, people do everything to make it worse,” he said.
In 2025, Ye claimed he’d been misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and in fact had
autism. But not long after he ran a full-page letter in
The Wall Street Journal in which he said he has bipolar disorder and that it was the cause of his years of erratic behavior and turn to anti-Semitism, for which he was apologizing.
Pop star Mariah Carey, 56, made headlines in 2018 when she revealed that she’d been diagnosed with bipolar 2 almost two decades before, after a breakdown that sent her to the hospital.
Bipolar 2 is characterized by major depressive episodes, as well as bouts of hypomania (a less-severe form of mania) and in-between periods of a neutral mood.
In an interview with People, Carey said she “didn’t want to believe” she had bipolar disorder and decided to keep it a secret: “I was so terrified of losing everything.” She chose to come forward when the burden of denial and fear became too heavy.
“I’m hopeful we can get to a place where the stigma is lifted from people going through anything alone,” she said. Bipolar disorder, she said, “does not have to define you and I refuse to allow it to define me or control me.”
Chappel Roan, 28, who won her first Grammy as best new artist in 2025, has been outspoken about having bipolar disorder.
“I’m diagnosed bipolar 2, and it’s been pretty hard to keep it together and release these songs,” she shared on Instagram in 2022 as she was launching her independent career. “I’ve been on meds, and I was in full swing hypomania when ‘Naked in Manhattan’ released, which I’m out of now. And the weeks leading up to and through the ‘My Kink Is Karma’ release campaign, I’ve been in intensive outpatient therapy/individual therapy four days a week, and it’s definitely been difficult to balance promoting and being consistently active on social media.”
About her bipolar diagnosis, she said, “I don’t really talk about it much, but it affects me daily and is a pretty big part of my music. I’m in a healthy spot, just wanted to share and I think it’s important to talk about mental health.”
Speaking to
Vanity Fair in 2023, she said, “It took me two years to find the right medications, and holy cow, it was so hard because I just felt, I was like, ‘Is it the bipolarity? Is it the meds not working? Is it my period?’ There were so many things that I was so confused. And finally I found a place that I feel good about my meds.”
Pete Wentz, 46, bass player of the rock band Fall Out Boy, opened up about having bipolar disorder during a 2015 interview with Howard Stern on SiriusXM.
Wentz described his twenties as a particularly tumultuous time, saying he’d been self-medicating while on tour to cope with what he later learned were bipolar symptoms.
“
My highs, my happiness, are really high and my lows are very low, and I’m not able to regulate between the two,” Wentz said. “Through actual therapy and having kids it’s way more under control and something I can see when I’m on the roller coaster and control it more.”
He told
People in 2018, “Living with purpose and having a
schedule with my family has brought me balance.” He also talked about the importance of
self-care for bipolar. “I think it can be different for everyone, but for me, just being able to talk through things, meditate, and exercise has been helpful,” he said.
Fisher, who died in 2016, at age 60, learned she had bipolar disorder when she was 24. But she rejected the diagnosis until a drug overdose prompted her to get sober after years of addiction. “Only then was I able to see nothing else could explain away my behavior,” she said.
In
Wishful Drinking, her 2008 memoir, Fisher wrote: “One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. Not unlike a tour of duty in Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you’re living with this illness and functioning at all, it’s something to be proud of, not ashamed of.”
Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor, who died in 2023 at age 56, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2003.
She talked openly about her struggle on
The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007. “Every pore of you is crying, and you don’t even understand why or what,” O’Connor said. “I actually kind of died and got born again as a result of taking the meds and having a chance to, you know, build a life.”
At age 50, broadcast journalist and author Jane Pauley, now 76, began experiencing episodes of depression and mania. Her doctors believed that steroid medication used to treat hives kick-started what was later diagnosed as bipolar disorder.
“It unmasked what doctors described as a genetic vulnerability to a mood disorder, and by that time I was in pretty deep trouble,” Pauley revealed on
CBS This Morning in 2019.
Pauley’s doctor tried to give her a cover story of thyroid issues to hide her diagnosis from her employers. She said she uses such experiences to “fight stigma with sophistication.”
Academy Award–winning actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, 56, revealed in 2011 that she was seeking treatment in a mental health facility for bipolar 2 disorder.
Zeta-Jones said that her husband Michael Douglas’s cancer diagnosis precipitated her mental health crisis. Bipolar “is something I have been dealing with for a long time,” she said. In reference to Douglas’s illness, she said. “When you get sideswiped like that, it’s an obvious trigger for your balance to be a little bit off — not sleeping, worry, stress. It’s a classic trigger.”
In 2012, Zeta-Jones appeared on
Good Morning America, explaining that she never wanted to be a poster child for bipolar disorder, but the news leaked. “It came out. And so I dealt with it in the best way I could and that was just say, ‘Look, hey, I’m bipolar,’” she said.
She told the
Sunday Telegraph, “I never wanted to be as open about it as I was. I have a British stiff-upper-lip mentality. It wasn’t something I wanted to shout from the rooftops. But when it did come to light, I know I’m not the only person who suffers with it or has to deal with it on a day-to-day basis. So if I’ve helped anybody by discussing bipolar or depression, that’s great.”
In 2017, rocker Scott Stapp of Creed, 52, made headlines for alcohol and drug use, and his erratic behavior. “In my delusional thinking, I thought my family was involved in ISIS and that millions of dollars had been taken from me to support terrorism,” he told
People. "All of it was nonsense. I was out of my mind.”
While in an intensive program in a treatment facility, Stapp was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “It was hard to process,” he said. “There’s a stigma associated with it. But Jaclyn [Stapp’s wife] kept telling me, ‘Embrace it. We love you.’ It became a big sigh of relief because finally we had an answer.”
