Perry Cossart Baird Jr.

• Baird was diagnosed with manic-depressive psychosis, now called bipolar disorder, after a severe manic episode in 1932 at age 29. He was admitted to the Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders, where the diagnosis was recorded. [1]
• Baird later wrote extensively about his illness and psychiatric confinement in a manuscript that eventually formed part of He Wanted the Moon, published decades after his death. [3][2]

• Baird experienced recurrent manic episodes that repeatedly interrupted his medical career and research. During episodes, his thinking could become grandiose and paranoid, and he could become highly agitated and destructive. [3][1]
• He wrote extensively about being confined in psychiatric institutions, including experiences of physical restraint and isolation. [3][2]

• During his first hospitalization in 1932, Baird underwent prolonged medically induced sleep or coma treatment. In later institutions, he underwent insulin coma therapy and electroconvulsive therapy. His hospitalizations also involved physical restraints and isolation. [4][2][1]
• In 1949, after years of recurrent illness and hospitalization, Baird underwent a prefrontal lobotomy. [4][1]

• Baird wrote critically about the psychiatric institutions in which he was confined, describing conditions he believed were punitive, degrading and harmful to patients. His unfinished manuscript documented restraints, isolation and the loss of autonomy he experienced while hospitalized. [3][2]
• Baird argued that manic-depressive illness should be investigated as a physiological and medical condition rather than understood as a purely psychological one, a view that shaped his research into a possible biochemical basis for mania. [1]

“I felt possessed with demoniacal energy. I was acutely manic.”

— Perry Cossart Baird Jr. [3]