July is Disability Pride Month, which absolutely includes invisible disabilities like migraine and other headache disorders. It took me far too long to claim the word “disabled” for myself, and migraine disease is a big part of that. Migraine has been part of my life for a long time, and a factor in my career since my very first feature story, during which I got a migraine so bad I vomited and had to leave. (Still managed the story, though.) There are 40 million of us just in the US, and a little research turned up so many incredible examples of famous people with migraine disease. I’m in the good company of athletes, EGOT winners, abolitionists, at least one Founding Father, and a nun who’s been dead for 800 years… and so many more.
Accuracy is always important, but it matters even more than usual here, because who gets believed … and treated… has always been part of the migraine story. So, fair warning: this is not 25 stories of Overcoming Adversity™. The whole spectrum belongs here, because migraine at every severity is still migraine.
– Janet Jay
Who gets migraines?
Migraine disease hits three times as many women as men, so you’d expect the famous names to be mostly women. Right? However, the historical record is wall-to-wall dudes, and I think we can all venture a guess why. Anyway…
It’s not just women’s pain that gets dismissed, either! Only 47% of Black Americans with headache disorders have an official diagnosis, versus 70% of white Americans. And I know from personal experience that age complicates things too: nobody takes a teenager’s pain as seriously as they should. My own pain started at 15, and for years the only diagnosis anyone offered was “too young” — too young to be in pain, too young for surgery, too young for meds, too young for anything. And I’m in good company. One of the most famous women on this list spent years being told she was “just stressed” before anyone said the word migraine.
A note on factuality, inspiration, and Overcoming Adversity™
Sad to say, but the many “cool history people with migraines” clickbait listicles I found? Usually just three rumors in a trenchcoat. Obviously, that doesn’t fly here, so everyone in my top 20 is confirmed: in their own words, in primary documents, or in the medical literature. (Sources linked, of course of course.) The five names history can’t prove are quarantined into their own clearly-labeled section at the bottom as some interesting possibilities.
Accuracy is always important, but it matters even more than usual here, because who gets believed … and treated… has always been part of the migraine story. So, fair warning: this is not 25 stories of Overcoming Adversity™. Yes, somebody on this list won a Super Bowl mid-attack. Somebody else played a Game 7 half-blind and got blamed for the loss for thirty years. And one guy retired from professional hockey at 25 because every resource in elite sports couldn’t make the attacks stop. That whole spectrum belongs here, because migraine at every severity is still migraine.
One language note before we start. “Migraine disease,” “headache disease” or “migraine” (not plural) is the technically correct way to refer to this. But I’ll use both those and “migraines” here, because that’s how actual humans talk.
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Musicians & entertainers with migraine
Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg has had migraine for forty years. Her long-time coping method was the one many of us know: lying on the floor in total darkness, sometimes under a table, waiting it out. Her aura shows up as curled silver aluminum foil at the edge of her vision. While hosting the Oscars, the pain hit: she powered through with ice packs between segments. EGOT winner or not, we’ve all done similar types of grim math. She’s a Nurtec spokesperson now (and FYI, when a celebrity’s treatment story is also a paid campaign, I’ll say so). Whoopi’s origin story even happened on live TV! A famous person with migraines on “The View” told her about Nurtec and said to ask her doctor. That guest was…
Khloé Kardashian
It was Khloé Kardashian, who has had migraine since sixth grade and even with her level of fame and wealth had to fight to be believed. She’s specifically posted about the special frustration of being told it’s “just a bad headache.” She’s a Nurtec spokesperson too — same disclosure as above. Say what you want about the Kardashian media machine, but when Khloé talks about migraine, millions of people hear her, and see that this is a real disease. Reach is its own kind of advocacy, and hers found Whoopi on national television.
Kristin Chenoweth
The night Kristin Chenoweth won her 2009 Emmy, the flashes of the paparazzi’s cameras sent her to the hospital instead of the afterparties. Her first attack hit at 25, mid-performance with the Virginia Symphony. She saw flashing lights she calls “kaleidoscope eyes,” then skull-crushing pain, then vomiting at intermission. She went back out and finished the show anyway.
The attacks escalated until she met the clinical definition of chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month. “I was gonna have to retire,” she said. That is, until Botox injections, now a standard preventive treatment for chronic migraine, gave her career back. (She partners with AbbVie, which makes Botox, on migraine awareness.) She also has vestibular migraine and Ménière’s disease. Chronic illness do love company. Speaking of…
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga’s migraine goes back to childhood, and as an adult she developed fibromyalgia as well. She’s described stretches where the combined pain left her barely able to function. Migraine rarely shows up alone, and treating one condition while the other is screaming is its own special project. She’s now a Nurtec ODT spokesperson (another paid campaign; the diagnosis is real either way).
Janet Jackson
In 2008, Janet Jackson abruptly canceled a string of tour dates. She was dealing with vestibular migraine too. It’s a sneaky subtype that’s especially hard to pinpoint: the room spins, the ears ring, but headache doesn’t always rear its ugly head. It’s badly underdiagnosed for exactly that reason: people don’t connect vertigo to migraine, and neither do plenty of doctors.
Simon Cowell
The red glasses he wears aren’t a bit or a fashion statement. Cowell has said the studio lights trigger his attacks “like a laser.” He missed tapings because of migraine, which he confirmed on an America’s Got Talent finale broadcast. The tinted lenses are his visible workaround for an invisible problem. Sometimes self-accommodation just looks like never taking your sunglasses off. Whatever works.
Jeff Tweedy
For years, Wilco’s frontman played shows with a bucket at the side of the stage so he could throw up between songs. Hardcore, yes, but also nothing anyone should normalize. Tweedy’s migraine goes back to around age six. Doctors prescribed Vicodin for the attacks; the painkillers became an opioid addiction; in 2004 he checked into dual-diagnosis rehab. That happened just as Wilco released A Ghost Is Born — an album whose 12-minute drone “Less Than You Think” was his attempt to make listeners feel a migraine. But getting treatment for both problems at once was the key to him making a real recovery. Finally, he can play Heavy Metal Drummer without pain! (Sorry, I just love that dang song.)
Athletes with migraine
Scottie Pippen
On June 3, 1990, Scottie Pippen warmed up for Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals with an aura and double vision so severe he could barely see his teammates. He played anyway — over 40 minutes, 1-of-10 shooting — and the Bulls lost to the Pistons. Then came the heartbreaking part: nobody believed him. Michael Jordan’s response before the game was reportedly “Hell, yes, he can play. Start him. Let him play blind.” Fans turned “the migraine game” into a punchline for decades. 30 years later, in 2020, The Last Dance documentary aired the doubt all over again. Pippen has called it the lowest point of his career. “I look back, and I’m like, ‘Wow, they really tried to dig into me,’” he recalled. Even Jordan eventually admitted the pile-on was unfair. The asterisk people put on his pain outlasted six championships anyway.
Terrell Davis
Eight years later, another aura arrived mid-championship. Terrell Davis took a knee to the helmet in the first quarter of Super Bowl XXXII and felt the warning signs he’d known since he was seven years old. Soon he was “seeing double and triple.” For years before that night, Davis had hidden his condition, figuring people would think he was exaggerating. An elite athlete leveled by a headache?! He sat out the second quarter while a dose of DHE nasal spray went to work. Then he managed to go back out after halftime and ran for three damn touchdowns. They gave him the MVP trophy. He remains the only player to win a Super Bowl MVP with a migraine attack in the box score, a record nobody is rushing to break.
Serena Williams
Here is yet another woman who spent her youth sidelined by headaches but who wasn’t diagnosed with migraine until years later. Until her twenties, Williams did what a lot of us were trained to do: played through the pain and said nothing, because tennis (and life in general) doesn’t stop for invisible pain. When pandemic-era stress escalated her attacks in 2020, she finally sought treatment and later became a spokesperson for Ubrelvy. (The diagnosis predates the paycheck. I take Ubrelvy too, tbqh!) She’s also used that platform to talk about who gets diagnosed in the first place: the 47% statistic in the intro is her fight too. But that disparity is disgusting enough that it ought to be all of our fight, regardless of skin color.
Dwyane Wade
In January 2011, Dwyane Wade missed a Miami Heat game with a migraine so photophobic he apologized to a reporter for not making eye contact. He found a workaround: tinted goggles! …Which the NBA promptly rejected as a “competitive advantage,” reasoning that opponents couldn’t read his eyes. He appealed with a lighter tint; LeBron wore goggles at practice in solidarity; the whole thing got dubbed “gogglegate.” Wade’s own summary: “I want to play, and I don’t want nothing to stop that.” Strip away the fame and this is just a workplace accommodation negotiation — one his employer initially denied, on television. Remember this one when we get to the ADA section.
Nolan Patrick
Here’s the entry the inspirational version of this post would skip. Nolan Patrick went second overall in the 2017 NHL Draft. In September 2019, a University of Michigan neurologist diagnosed him with a migraine disorder — one that runs in his family. He missed the entire following season, at one point going 650 days between NHL games.
He fought back into the lineup, struggled, played his last game in March 2022, spent Vegas’s Stanley Cup season on injured reserve, and retired in December 2023, at 25. Patrick had NHL medical staff, elite specialists, and every resource money buys, and still couldn’t find a solution that let him play. Migraine is hereditary, it is not a toughness test, and sometimes it ends careers at any scale, in any job. It’s not always manageable. You can’t always just power through. And it’s nobody’s fault.
Patrick… had every resource money buys, and still couldn’t find a solution that let him play. Migraine is hereditary, it is not a toughness test, and sometimes it ends careers at any scale, in any job. It’s not always manageable. You can’t always just power through. And it’s nobody’s fault.
– Janet Jay
Politics & advocacy with migraine
Cindy McCain
Do you remember the sunglasses Cindy McCain wore all through her husband John’s 2008 presidential campaign? Plenty of people assumed she was pulling a diva move. But like others on this list, the real reason was photophobia — the campaign lights, she later said, were “killer”. She suffered for literally decades, but wasn’t officially diagnosed until she was 40: before that, she’s said, doctors told her she was “neurotic, or you’re just stressed, take an aspirin.” She kept the disease private for years — and then did the loud opposite, launching the 36 Million Migraine Campaign with the American Migraine Foundation and testifying to Congress about how little funding migraine research gets.
Here’s why she earns a spot the others don’t cover: McCain flatly calls migraine “a disability” — the exact question this whole post is circling, and one I dig into at the bottom. (Her migraine also comes with real stakes: with a history of stroke, she can’t take preventive medications, a bind a lot of us with complicating conditions will recognize.)
Writers & thinkers with migraine
Joan Didion
If you’ve never read Joan Didion’s “In Bed” (1968, from The White Album): bookmark my site, go read it, and come back. (She said the essay drew a bigger response than anything else she wrote.) Didion had her first migraine at age eight, during a fire drill, and as an adult was down “three, four, sometimes five times a month,” spending those days lost in a darkened room.
Spending this time in her room “unconscious with pain,” when there was nothing wrong with her, she wrote, had seemed “a shameful secret, evidence not merely of some chemical inferiority but of all my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink.” The attitude that dominated medical and popular understanding at the time (remember, this is 1968 medicine) held that that migraine headaches were either imaginary or self-inflicted.
Spending this time in her room “unconscious with pain,” when there was nothing wrong with her, Didion wrote, had seemed “a shameful secret, evidence not merely of some chemical inferiority but of all my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink.” The attitude… at the time … held that that migraine headaches were either imaginary or self-inflicted.
– Janet Jay
So she persisted, wishing “only for a neurosurgeon who would do a lobotomy on house call.” Her line about how nobody dies of migraine, which mid-attack can feel like “an ambiguous blessing,” has been quoted ever since. And she name-checks fellow migraineurs: Thomas Jefferson and Ulysses S. Grant, both of whom are further down this very page.
Virginia Woolf
In 1926, Virginia Woolf wrote “On Being Ill”, partly from bed, and diagnosed the real problem. English, she wrote, has “no words for the shiver and the headache.” Her diaries and letters document recurrent headaches that flattened her for days at a stretch. Because of this, migraine literature has claimed her as one of its essential writers. Let me be precise here, because her health history is tangled. What’s documented is debilitating, recurring head pain. And she managed, better than anyone ever has, to articulate the particular challenges about illness outrunning language. That’s exactly the gap between what we mean when we say ‘I have a migraine’ and how people merely hear, ‘I have a headache.’”
Lewis Carroll
In an 1885 diary entry, Lewis Carroll recorded “that odd optical affection of seeing moving fortifications, followed by a head-ache” — textbook migraine aura. Seventy years later, psychiatrist John Todd named “Alice in Wonderland syndrome” after Carroll’s book. These are real neurological episodes, often migraine-linked, where your body feels suddenly too large or too small. Whether Alice’s size changes actually came from Carroll’s auras is a hypothesis (his dated migraine entries postdate the novel). But he wrote about his migraines in his own words, and you can read about AIWS in its own medical literature.
Oliver Sacks
Sacks is truly one of the greatest writers of our time. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was what inspired me to write about medicine, and I can’t sing his praises enough. But back to migraine. Sacks wrote one of the foundational modern books on this disease (Migraine, 1970). But this differed from his earlier attempts: this time, it was personal.
Sacks’s own visual auras started around age three or four, and he lived with migraine with aura for years while treating patients nobody else took seriously. That’s a rare combination, patient and physician, and it’s why his book treats migraine as a full human experience instead of a symptom checklist. It’s also Sacks who made the most famous retrospective migraine call in history, which brings us to a 12th-century nun. (Seriously, just go read some dang Oliver Sacks.)
Historical figures with migraine
Harriet Tubman
Around age 13, an overseer threw a two-pound weight that fractured Harriet Tubman’s skull. She received no medical care for two days. For the rest of her life she lived with crushing head pain, sudden sleep attacks, and visions. There’s evidence for this both through her own words and her contemporaries’ accounts. Her description of a head “achin’ and buzzin’” so badly she couldn’t sleep is viscerally familiar to anybody with migraine disease. Hell, in her late seventies she walked into a Boston hospital and asked a surgeon to open her skull, reportedly going through the operation without anesthesia. We’ve all had desperate moments.
Notice what I haven’t called it: migraine. But migraine is just one term that falls under the umbrella of headache disease (shoutout to my trigeminal neuralgia homies). The medical literature classifies her condition as post-traumatic, and nobody can diagnose her at 160 years’ distance, least of all me.
She’s here because chronic head pain shaped one of the most consequential lives in American history — the kind of disability history that keeps getting left out of the retelling. Historian Deirdre Cooper Owens argues that we owe Tubman “the respect to add the adjective “disabled” to Tubman’s list of descriptions when we discuss her identities”- which helps us see “the powerful intersections between disability and strength.”
“Imagine if we were taught that Harriet Tubman was not only a conductor on the Underground Railroad but was a badass, disabled freedom-fighting fugitive, Civil War military veteran, healer, philanthropist and one of the architects of the enduring Black Women’s Club Movement that birthed civic and fraternal organizations for Black women all over the United States,” says Owens.
Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegard of Bingen — Benedictine abbess, composer, medical writer, future saint — recorded visions of cascading stars, shimmering concentric rings, and zigzag fortification walls in illuminated manuscripts. If you’ve had visual aura, you may already be nodding (or squinting). When she hesitated to put her visions on paper, she said, she was “laid low by the scourge of God” and “fell upon a bed of sickness.” Historian Charles Singer proposed the migraine diagnosis in 1913; Sacks’s Migraine appendix called her visions “indisputably migrainous”; researchers have since matched her art against modern patients’ aura drawings. Of course, it’s still a diagnosis at 900 years’ distance, but it’s the one retrospective call headache medicine treats as all but settled. Which is why she’s up here and not in the basement section with the maybes!
“Imagine if we were taught that Harriet Tubman was not only a conductor on the Underground Railroad but was a badass, disabled freedom-fighting fugitive, Civil War military veteran, healer and philanthropist…”
Deirdre Cooper Owens, “Harriet Tubman’s Disability and Why it Matters“
Ulysses S. Grant
The night before Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Ulysses S. Grant — the man commanding the entire Union Army — lay in a Virginia farmhouse soaking his feet in hot mustard water with mustard plasters on his wrists and neck, fighting what he called a “sick headache,” a 19th-century term for migraine. (Before you judge the mustard, go look at your own cabinet of desperation buys.) Shockingly, it didn’t work. Grant rode out on the morning of April 9, 1865, still in pain — until a courier handed him Lee’s note agreeing to surrender. “The instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured,” he wrote in his memoirs. And that’s a small miracle in and of itself. (Mine… do not work like that, however.) Remember Didion name-dropping her fellow migraineurs? This attack, in his own words, is one of the stories she meant.
5 Famous People Who Probably Had Migraine
(But We Can’t Prove It)
Diagnosing the dead is a genre. Neurologists publish papers analyzing paintings for aura. Other neurologists publish rebuttals pointing out that you can’t diagnose anyone from their art alone without letters, diaries, or someone who watched it happen. Ah, academia. But anyway.
Everyone so far cleared the sourcing bar. These five didn’t — but the theories are too interesting or fun to throw away. So here they are, labeled honestly as hypotheses, not facts.
Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson’s “periodical head-achs” run through his own letters for 44 years. His attacks could last weeks, confined in a dark room with his near-constant pain. He was “obliged to avoid reading writing and almost thinking.” In spring 1776, after his mother’s death, a headache kept him down for six weeks. Once the pain relented, he went and drafted the damn Declaration of Independence! (The “wrote it mid-migraine” version circulating online merges two events that didn’t overlap.) Physicians have argued migraine versus tension-type versus cluster in actual journals. Verdict: something recurrent and brutal; classification contested. If you ask me, he qualifies.
Charles Darwin
Doctors and historians have proposed more than forty diagnoses for Darwin’s lifelong illness. What can we prove? Headaches, relentless vomiting, fatigue, and visual disturbances he described as “fiery spokes and dark clouds” before his eyes. A leading modern hypothesis is cyclic vomiting syndrome, a condition so entwined with migraine that headache medicine classifies them as relatives. If that camp is right, Darwin belongs one section up. Nobody can prove it. Verdict: the most medically interesting maybe on this list.
Vincent Van Gogh
The retrospective differential on Van Gogh is a graveyard of theories: epilepsy, Ménière’s disease, porphyria, bipolar disorder, lead poisoning. A 2021 paper proposes vestibular migraine as the diagnosis that unifies his documented vertigo, head pain, and attacks, and a 2025 analysis includes his work among six painters whose imagery suggests aura. Worth knowing: his time spent at Saint-Rémy was for psychiatric care — not, as some listicles claim, migraine treatment. Verdict: plausible, unprovable.
Edvard Munch
Some see “The Scream” as a migraine attack rendered in paint. It could be migraine aura, others say cluster headache, and again, we’re all guessing. Munch’s diaries document both chronic ill health and the blood-red-sky moment that inspired the image. This is the thinnest entry in the post — he didn’t even make that 2025 six-painter analysis. Verdict: vibes, mostly. But honestly, he has a number of works that read ‘migraine’ to me, including “The Sick Child” (up top).
Georges Seurat
Here’s a tricky one you have to flip around. Did Seurat have migraines? Nobody knows! BUT he’s here because migraine claimed him. Ever heard of the “Seurat effect?”
The shimmering visual static some of us get during aura looks so much like pointillism that the literature borrowed his name. He’s not a patient; he’s a vocabulary word.
Frequently Asked Questions
Legally: yes, it can be. The ADA defines a disability as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. But that’s a legal definition, not a medical one. The EEOC treats migraine as an impairment; whether yours rises to a disability depends on how much it limits what are called “ADLs,” or “Activities of daily living.”
The legal definition and the identity are two different doors into the same house. You can qualify under the ADA and never call yourself disabled. And you can claim the word proudly without ever filing paperwork. I wrote about walking through that second door here.
ADA employment protections apply to employers with 15 or more people— up to and including pro sports teams. If it does apply, reasonable accommodations can include flexible scheduling, lighting and noise changes, scent policies, a dark quiet room, and medication breaks (most of which cost employers close to nothing!)
And the obligatory line: I’m a writer, not a lawyer — if your employer is being shitty about accommodations, the EEOC and an employment attorney are the correct phone calls.
Confirmed, on the record: Serena Williams, Lady Gaga, Whoopi Goldberg, Kristin Chenoweth, Khloé Kardashian, Janet Jackson, Simon Cowell, Dwyane Wade, Jeff Tweedy, Cindy McCain, and more — all sourced above, several as paid spokespeople for migraine medications (flagged where relevant).
I went looking and found no primary documentation — no letters, diaries, or firsthand accounts. The claim circulates on unsourced celebrity-migraine lists, usually alongside equally unsourced claims about JFK and Elvis. That’s exactly the folklore this post exists to avoid.
Strong maybe, but just a maybe. Unproven. Vestibular migraine is one published hypothesis among many — epilepsy, Ménière’s disease, and others have serious scholarly backing — and his documented treatment at Saint-Rémy was psychiatric. He’s in this post’s “can’t prove it” section, where he belongs.
Confirmed examples: Serena Williams, Terrell Davis (who won a Super Bowl MVP mid-attack), Scottie Pippen, Dwyane Wade, and Nolan Patrick, who retired from the NHL at 25 because of migraine disease.
Who did I miss? Sourced nominations in the comments — receipts required, that’s the whole point. And if migraine is your disease too? Here’s my actual migraine routine, the gear that earns its shelf space, and some thoughts on mobility aids, visibility, and Selma Blair.
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