Bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive illness, involves extreme mood swings - from overly "high" and/or irritable to sad and hopeless, and then back again. Severe changes in energy and behavior go along with these changes in mood. The periods of highs and lows are called episodes of mania and depression. Different from the normal ups and downs that everyone goes through, the symptoms of bipolar disorder are severe. They can result in damaged relationships, poor job or school performance, and even suicide. But there is good news: bipolar disorder can be treated, and people with this illness can lead full and productive lives.

As we know, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were married in 1940. During the war years, Vivien with her husband worked hard on stages. Remembering this period, stepson Tarquin Olivier, said, "She was an insomniac always, and he had to sit up with her, and he was not an insomniac. She only needed about three or four hours a night. It was very hard." In 1944, while filming Caesar and Cleopatra, Vivien discovered she was pregnant, but a fall on the set caused her to miscarry. It was Tarquin's opinion that losing that baby "caused her manic depression to come forward" (Biography, 2000). Additionally, in 1945 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Bipolar disorder was little understood at that time. Lithium was not yet in use, and the only treatment Vivien received was shock therapy, which was not then administered with the same level of care as today. Tarquin Olivier saw burns on his stepmother's temples at times from her shock treatments. Vivien's ill health, physical and mental, began to strain her marriage. Vivien was drinking heavily at times, culminating in a breakdown during the filming of Elephant Walk (she was replaced by Elizabeth Taylor).

In spite of her illnesses, she continued to work in a handful of films and on stage, winning a second Oscar for her performance in A Streetcar Named Desire. Laurence Olivier finally divorced her in 1960 to marry an actress Joan Plowright. Though Vivien lived for the rest of her life with an actor Jack Merivale, friends agree that Olivier was her great love. Vivien Leigh died of tuberculosis in 1967.

Laurence Olivier (from his autobiography): Throughout her possession by that uncannily evil monster, manic depression, with its deadly ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness – an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me, for whom she could hardly be expected to take the trouble.