A severe nervous breakdown altered Galton's original intention to try for honours. He elected instead to take a "poll" (pass) B.A. degree, like his half-cousin Charles Darwin.

At the age of 16, Mill refused to study at the Cambridge University or Oxford. Instead, he decided to work for a living as a clerk at the East India Company. One year later, he published his first article but he soon began to experience problems with his mental health. When he was 20 years old, he had a nervous breakdown which he attributed to rigorous study and lack of normal childhood. At the same time, he started questioning his views and became interested in art and poetry.

He would spend the next six years of his life “thinking” about electromagnetic fields and a hypothetical motor powered by alternate-current that would and should work. The thoughts obsessed him, and he was unable to focus on his schoolwork. Professors at the university warned Tesla’s father that the young scholar’s working and sleeping habits were killing him. But rather than finish his studies, Tesla became a gambling addict, lost all his tuition money, dropped out of school and suffered a nervous breakdown. It would not be his last.

Hume entered Edinburgh University when he was about 12 years old and left it at 14 or 15, as was then usual. Pressed a little later to study law (in the family tradition on both sides), he found it distasteful and instead read voraciously in the wider sphere of letters. Because of the intensity and excitement of his intellectual discovery, he had a nervous breakdown in 1729, from which it took him a few years to recover.

However, it was also during this period that Godel’s mental health began to deteriorate. He suffered from bouts of depression, and, after the murder of Moritz Schlick, one of the leaders of the Vienna Circle, by a deranged student, Godel suffered a nervous breakdown. In the years to come, he suffered several more.

Riemann was the second of six children, shy and suffering from numerous nervous breakdowns. Riemann exhibited exceptional mathematical skills, such as calculation abilities, from an early age but suffered from timidity and a fear of speaking in public.

Wittgenstein seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Russell: "He suddenly stood still and explained that the way we had spent the afternoon was so vile that we ought not to live, or at least he ought not, that nothing is tolerable except producing great works or enjoying those of others, that he has accomplished nothing and never will - all this with a force that knocks one down."

Or: "He seems not far removed from suicide, feeling himself a miserable creature, full of sin."

The extremely high workload eventually told on Faraday's health and in 1839 he suffered a nervous breakdown. He did recover his health and by 1845 he began intense research activity again

The combination of these events caused Liszt to have a nervous breakdown. He discontinued any music making and diligently frequented the church, even contemplating priesthood. His removal from society was such that it even led to rumors that he had died.

Trivers would go on to join the boxing team at Phillips Academy, Andover. He would also go on to drop math his freshman year at Harvard, decide to become a lawyer, suffer a nervous breakdown that kept him from getting in to any law schools, enroll in Harvard's doctoral program in biology without having taken a single biology class as an undergraduate, and-while still a grad student-write the first in a series of papers that would revolutionize the field of evolutionary biology.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3894157&forum_id=2#35411444)

- Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3894157&forum_id=2#35411742)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3894157&forum_id=2#35415071)

Five times between 1889 (when he was 23) and 1901, he spent time at the Battle Creek Sanitorium for reasons Sinclair described as "fatigue, overstrain, and nervous illnesses"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3894157&forum_id=2#36478020)