Liz Miller

• Miller has publicly identified her diagnosis as bipolar I disorder. In a first-person account for the Doctors’ Support Network, she wrote that she was diagnosed at age 29. She later discussed her experience publicly, including appearing in Stephen Fry’s 2006 documentary The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. [1]

• Miller has described becoming depressed while training in neurosurgery in her late twenties, followed by a manic episode during which she stopped going to work and was sectioned. Looking back on the decade after her diagnosis, she described it as “ten disastrous years” that included three periods of being sectioned and more than a year spent in psychiatric wards. [6][1]

• Miller has said that she disliked the effects of psychiatric medication and began looking for non-drug approaches to managing her mental health. She became involved in the Manic Depression Fellowship’s self-management programme and explored non-medical therapies while writing about them for the organization’s magazine. [6]
• She developed Mood Mapping from her own efforts to understand and manage changes in her mood. Miller described keeping a diary four times a day and tracking both her energy and how positive or negative she felt. [6][1]

• Miller has described a long period of stability following the years in which she experienced severe episodes of bipolar disorder. In her account for the Doctors’ Support Network, she wrote that she remained well and was no longer taking psychiatric medication. [6][1]
• Miller has described herself as having overcome bipolar disorder, while continuing to frame that conclusion as her own experience. [2]

• Miller has campaigned particularly around the mental health of doctors and the stigma attached to mental illness within medicine. Through the Doctors’ Support Network, she worked to provide peer support for doctors experiencing mental-health problems and to challenge stigma within medicine. [7][3]
• After being named Mind Mental Health Champion of the Year in 2008, Miller said that changing attitudes toward mental health should begin within the medical profession. [4]

“By building discipline when you are well, it becomes easier to act when you are not so well.”

— Liz Miller [1]