Van Gogh    

The iris…has become a symbol of the beauty and talent that can be overwhelmed by serious mental illness.

Vincent van Gogh died by suicide when he was 37.  He suffered from depression, paranoid delusions and visual and auditory hallucinations.

 In the five years before his death he produced more than 800 oil paintings including his irises. 

Vincent wrote his brother, Theo:  “Oh, if I could have worked without this accursed disease, what things I might have done.”

Today there is treatment available that would have eased his suffering, but still no cure.

We are the parents, siblings, children and friends of today’s victims of no fault brain diseases. such as schizophrenia, major depression, bi-polar mood disorders and obsessive compulsive disorder.   

We provide family support and public education as well as advocacy for continued research and quality care.

People with mental illnesses enrich our lives. These people have experienced one of the major mental illnesses of schizophrenia, bipolar or major depression

Abraham Lincoln  Virginia Woolf  Lionel Aldridge  Eugene O’Neill  Beethoven Gaetano Donizetti Robert Schumann  Leo Tolstoy  Vaslou Nijinsky John Keats Tennessee Williams  Vincent Van Gogh  Edgar Allen Poe   Isaac Newton   Ernest Hemingway   Sylvia Plath   Michelangelo   Winston Churchill   John Nash   Vivien Leigh   Emperer Norton I   Jimmy Piersall   Patty Duke   Charles Dickens    Jane Pauley   Judy Collins     More...