Burns may have been bipolar, claim experts
HE is renowned as Scotland’s greatest poet, with a reputation for enjoying whisky, women and song.
But new analysis of hundreds of letters written by Robert Burns suggests his emotional highs and lows could indicate bipolar disorder.
The Bard’s moods cycled between ‘depression and hypomania’, say researchers who have studied 800 of his letters and journals.
And the disorder could explain Burns’s periods of intense creativity and his unstable love life.
Using modern psychiatry methods, researchers at the University of Glasgow looked at tranches of letters written over nine years to analyse his state of mind.
The first set, from around December 1793, detailed Burns feeling ‘altogether Novemberish, a damn’d melange of fretfulness and melancholy... my soul flouncing & fluttering’. Experts said two of the letters met the criteria for clinical depression and that gaps where the poet appeared to have written no letters could indicate social withdrawal.
Another set of letters, from early 1787, showed evidence of depression and anxiety ‘about being exposed to the public’, while writings from 1790 detailed ‘a period of great physical and creative activity’, the team said.
The initial findings are published in The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
Principal researcher Moira Hansen said: ‘Blue devilism was the term Burns used to describe periods of depression which he suffered, periods which affected his life and his work – not something you would automatically expect of someone with a worldwide reputation for knowing how to enjoy himself – and something our project is properly studying for the first time.
‘The work published in this article shows we can use Burns’s letters as a source of evidence, in place of having the face-to-face interviews a psychiatrist would normally have.
‘We have pinpointed evidence which showed bouts of increased energy and hyperactivity, and periods of depression and withdrawal.’
Mrs Hansen added: ‘We believe that Burns may have had what we would recognise today as bipolar disorder. We will carry out further analysis to create a mood map of his life to chart these highs and lows, linking it to what was happening both in his private and public life to judge how it impacted on his writing.’
Daniel Smith, professor of psychiatry at the University of Glasgow, said: ‘Obviously it hasn’t been an easy task given our subject has been dead for more than 200 years.
‘We hope that the possibility that our national Bard, a global icon, may have had bipolar disorder will contribute to discussions on the links between mental illness and creativity. It might also help to destigmatise psychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorder and depression.’