Creativity and mental health
In the Aristotelian tradition, genius was viewed from a physiological standpoint, and it was believed that the same human quality was perhaps responsible for both extraordinary achievement and melancholy.
[citation needed] Three studies by Mark Batey and Adrian Furnham have demonstrated the relationships between schizotypal[13][14] and hypomanic personality[15] and several different measures of creativity.
[17] A study involving more than one million people, conducted by Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute, reported a number of correlations between creative occupations and mental illnesses.
Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, and were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves.
He found that capturing your ideas, seeking out challenges, increasing your knowledge, and surrounding yourself with others who do the same help creativity grow rather than focusing on your stress.
[20][22] A 2005 study at the Stanford University School of Medicine measured creativity by showing children figures of varying complexity and symmetry and asking whether they like or dislike them.
The study showed for the first time that a sample of children who either have or are at high risk for bipolar disorder tend to dislike simple or symmetric symbols more.
[23] A study by Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave suggested that high levels of self-reported anxiety and depression amongst musicians might be explained, at least in part, by the nature of their working conditions.
One such research paper concludes, "Negative moods signal that the status quo is problematic and that additional effort needs to be exerted to come up with new and useful ideas.
These were characterized by "pronounced increases in enthusiasm, energy, self-confidence, speed of mental association, fluency of thought and elevated mood".
The severity of the manic episodes can mean that the person is seriously disabled and unable to express the heightened perceptions and flight of thoughts and ideas in a practical way.
Individuals with Bipolar II Disorder experience milder periods of hypomania during which the flight of ideas, faster thought processes and ability to take in more information can be converted to art, poetry or design.
Other notable creative people with bipolar disorder include Carrie Fisher, Demi Lovato, Kanye West, Stephen Fry (who has cyclothymia, a milder and more chronic form of bipolar disorder),[35] Mariah Carey, Jaco Pastorius, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Ronald Braunstein,[36][37] and Patty Duke.
[42] In a 2002 conversation with Christopher Langan, educational psychologist Arthur Jensen stated that the relationship between creativity and mental disorder "has been well researched and is proven to be a fact", writing that schizothymic characteristics are somewhat more frequent in philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists than in the general population.
Ludwig van Beethoven, Kanye West, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Newton, Judy Garland, Jaco Pastorius and Robert Schumann are some people whose lives have been researched to discover signs of mood disorder.
[46] In many instances, creativity and mania – the overwhelming highs that bipolar individuals often experience – share some common traits, such as a tendency for "thinking outside the box," flights of ideas, the speeding up of thoughts and heightened perception of visual, auditory and somatic stimuli.
Some creative people have been posthumously diagnosed as experiencing bipolar or unipolar disorder based on biographies, letters, correspondence, contemporaneous accounts, or other anecdotal material, most notably in Kay Redfield Jamison's book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.
may be found in a disproportionate number of people in creative professions such as actors, artists, comedians, musicians, authors, performers and poets.
Van Lieburg also draws additional support from Michelangelo's letters to his father in which he states: "I lead a miserable existence and reck not of life nor honour – that is of this world; I live wearied by stupendous labours and beset by a thousand anxieties.
In 2017, associate professor of psychiatry Gail Saltz stated that the increased production of divergent thoughts in people with mild to moderate mental illnesses leads to greater creative capacities.
"[59] Mania risk has also been credited with aiding in creative accomplishments[60] because "when speed of thinking increases, word associations form more freely, as do flight of ideas, because the manic mind is less inclined to filtering details that, in a normal state, would be dismissed as irrelevant.
[42] These correlations could be due, in part, to shared vulnerability factors between creativity and psychopathology, including neural hyper-connectivity, novelty salience, cognitive disinhibition, and emotional lability.
These factors continue to drive further research, like the study Anxiety and Adverse Life Events in Professional Creative and Early Psychosis Populations (Crabtree et al.[61]).
[62][page needed] Creativity can also have an incredible impact on mental health and well-being by not only helping people find meaning and significance, but providing an increased sense of purpose.
I wrote [I Never Promised You a Rose Garden] as a way of describing mental illness without the romanticisation [sic] that it underwent in the sixties and seventies when people were taking LSD to simulate what they thought was a liberating experience.
