Delta College Library
Celebrities with Psychological Disorders
One psychology assignment requires the students to write a paper about a celebrity and his/her psychological disorder. One of the first things that the student has to do is identify a specific celebrity with a psychological disorder. Here are some links that may help.
Locating Information in Books
Use ValCat online catalog, to locate reference and circulating books found in the Delta College Library or area Public Libraries. The keyword strategies shown on the left part of this screen can work, especially when typing in the search box, the name of the person who has the psychological disorder.
Specific books within the Delta Library that may help are:
- A brilliant madness: living with manic-depressive illness.
RC 516 .D85 1993. Biography of Patty Duke.
- Creativity and madness: new findings and old stereotypes.
BF 408 .R682 1994
- Divine madness: ten stories of creative struggle.
RC 465 .K68 2006. The ten stories are about Sylvia Plath, Judy Garland, Mark Rothko, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Charles Mingus, Vaslav Nijinsky, Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce, and Brian Wilson.
- Genius and the mind: studies of creativity and temperament.
BF 412 .G435 1998. This book covers a few celebrities such as Lord Byron and Mozart. Look at the index.
- Howard Hughes: his life and madness. CT 275 .H6678 B37.
- Manic depression and creativity. BF 423 .H474 1998. Among the people covered in this book are Beethoven, Dickens, Newton, and Van Gogh.
- The Price of greatness: resolving the creativity and madness controversy. BF 423 .L83 1995.
- Touched with fire: manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament. RC 516 .J36 1994. Use the index and the various lists in the back of the book.
- Understanding creativity. BF 408 .P87 2004. Take a look at the table of contents and the index. Pages 196 and 197 will provide a chart of poets and writers with depression or manic depression. Some chapters, such as chapter seven, will mention psychopathology of celebrities.
FirstSearch: WorldCat is an online catalog that lists the holdings of thousands of libraries throughout the U.S. . If you find an item on WorldCat, Delta College Library can try to interlibrary loan the item. There is no cost for this service.
InfoTrac is available from the Delta Library Website (Journals and Magazines), either on campus or remotely. For OFF-Campus access, use your Delta username and password.
- Use either Expanded Academic, General Reference Center Gold, or Health Reference Center Academic.
FirstSearch: SocialSciAbs (includes a lot of psychology articles) available from the Delta Library Website (Journals and Magazines), either on campus or remotely. For OFF-Campus access, use your Delta username and password.
- TIP: For your convenience, you may want to find articles that can be found within Delta Library. SocialSciAbs will do this for you. When you are on the search screen, click within the little white box next to "Subscriptions held by my library (EDK, DELTA COL LIBR)."
- TIP: For your convenience, you may want to find only articles that are full-text. SocialSciAbs will do this for you. When you are on the search screen, click within the little white box next to "full-text."
- TIP: SocialSciAbs contains a lot of social and psychological articles so you may want to just type in the name of your celebrity and see what is in this database/index on your subject. Another search strategy is to just type in the term celebrities as a subject search and then browse through the list.
FirstSearch: WilsonSelectPlus available from the Delta Library Website (Journals and Magazines), either on campus or remotely. For OFF-Campus access, use your Delta username and password.
- TIP: Almost every article within WilsonSelectPlus is full-text. You may want to just type in the name of your celebrity in the search box and then browse the list.
FirstSearch: ReadersGuideAbs available from the Delta Library Website (Journals and Magazines), either on campus or remotely. For OFF-Campus access, use your Delta username and password.
- TIP: For your convenience, you may want to find articles that can be found within Delta Library. ReadersGuideAbs will do this for you. When you are on the search screen, click within the little white box next to "Subscriptions held by my library (EDK, DELTA COL LIBR)."
- TIP: For your convenience, you may want to find only articles that are full-text. ReadersGuideAbs will do this for you. When you are on the search screen, click within the little white box next to "full-text."
- TIP: You may want to just type in the name of your celebrity in the search box and then browse the list.
FirstSearch: Biography Index available from the Delta Library Website (Journals and Magazines), either on campus or remotely. For OFF-Campus access, use your Delta username and password.
- TIP: Biography Index is an index for finding books and periodical articles about people. PLEASE REMEMBER that if you find something that is not at Delta College Library, the Library can try to interlibrary loan the item for you from another library, for free. For your convenience, you may want to find articles that can be found within Delta Library. Biography Index will do this for you. When you are on the search screen, click within the little white box next to "Subscriptions held by my library (EDK, DELTA COL LIBR)."
InfoTrac: InfoTrac Custom Newspapers available from the Delta Library Website (Journals and Magazines), either on campus or remotely. For OFF-Campus access, use your Delta username and password.
- TIP: InfoTrac Custom Newspapers has a tendency to retrieve A LOT of full-text newspaper articles per topic. You may want to use more than just a name in your search strategy in order to help provide more relative information, such as "Howard Hughes and mental."
Here are some examples of magazine and journal articles that you can find by using the databases/indexes listed above:
Bostic, J.Q. and Pataki, C. (2000, December). All the world's a
stage. Journal of the American of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry. 39, 1565-7. Retrieved November 21, 2005 from
WilsonSelectPlus database.
Buchwald, A. (1999, Nov./Dec.1999). Celebrity meltdown: public
figures' struggles with mental illness. Psychology Today, 32,
42-49. Retrieved November 28, 2005 from SocialSciencesAbs
database.
Fowler, R.D. (1986). Howard Hughes: a psychological
autopsy. Psychology Today, 20, 22-25.
PLEASE note that this particular article is on microfilm.
Locating Information on the WWW
Search the following Web sites to locate information on your topic:
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Phone: 989-686-9016
Fax: 989-686-4131
e-mail: library@delta.edu