Look if you ask a child 'Would you rather have a fulfilled mother or a stay-at-home Sylvia Plath ' they'll pick Sylvia Plath every time. But I think it's really important that children don't feel their parents' emotional lives depend on their success.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.