Shortly before her thirtieth birthday, Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Flagrantly manic and terrified that medications would cause her to lose creativity, she began a years-long struggle to find mental stability while retaining her passions and creativity. Now 17 years stable, she is an award-winning artist and mental health advocate.
Forney’s groundbreaking graphic memoirs tell the story of her diagnosis as bipolar and subsequent search for stability. Funny, engaging, and intimate, Forney offers a vivid look inside the experience of mental illness, and shares her own path to a creative, balanced life. Using her award-winning comics, Forney’s work is exemplary of graphic medicine – using comics to help patients,doctors, general readers, and communities, in an accessible format.
Searching to make sense of the popular concept of the crazy artist, she finds inspiration from the lives and work of other artists and writers who suffered from mood disorders, including Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, William Styron, and Sylvia Plath. She also researches the clinical aspects of bipolar disorder, including the strengths and limitations of various treatments and medications, and what studies tell us about the conundrum of attempting to “cure” an otherwise brilliant mind.
Ellen Forney is the author of the best-selling Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me and Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life. Her work has appeared in Time Magazine, the Guardian, and JAMA. She curated the traveling exhibition, “Graphic Medicine: Ill-Conceived & Well-Drawn!” for the National Library of Medicine. Her awards include The Stranger Genius Award, the Inkpot Award, and the Media Partner Award from the National Alliance For Mental Illness (NAMI) Washington among others. She is a frequent speaker, giving keynotes and workshops at venues such as Dartmouth University, George Washington University and others, and was keynote speaker at the Comics & Medicine Conference at Johns Hopkins University. Marbles was the 2018–19 Common Book for the University of Washington Health Sciences and multiple other Common Book programs.
Marbles and Rock Steady: Understanding bipolar through comics
In her intensely personal, funny, and inspiring presentation, Ellen Forney discusses her firsthand experience and creative work on struggling, coping, and thriving with bipolar disorder. Integrating images from her New York Times bestselling graphic memoir, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me, and its companion book, Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life, a manual of coping tools for maintaining mental health, she offers company, inspiration, and coping tools that anyone, with or without a mental illness diagnosis, can use to stay on an even keel. Topics touched on include stigma, treatment, disability, health care, and LGBT issues.