Mental illness remains highly stigmatized, even after celebrities like Brooke Shields, Mel Gibson and Robin Williams went public with their stories. So it was really a big deal 60 years ago when the Boston Red Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall wrote two articles in the Saturday Evening Post entitled “They Called Me Crazy—And I Was.” Mr. Piersall’s courageous description of his struggles with manic depression, now called bipolar disorder, helped bring the disease and its treatments out of the shadows.
That Mr. Piersall had mental illness was at first far from clear. He was born in 1929 to a mother who would later spend time in mental institutions. As a child, he had always been high strung and, as a slick-fielding minor league centerfielder in the Red Sox organization in the early 1950s, seemed incapable of relaxation.
But during the winter prior to spring training in 1952, Mr. Piersall truly began acting strangely. Concerned that the Red Sox wanted to make him a shortstop and nervous about becoming a father for the first time, he went to movies and roamed the streets without his wife, Mary. He had to be forced to go to spring training.
[For more of this story, written by Barron H. Lerner, go to http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/...s-on-the-ball-field/]
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