Science / Medicine : Madness of Creativity New research has shown that myth is reality--there is an association between certain psychiatric disorders and artistic success.
“All who have been famous for their genius . . . have been inclined to insanity.” Aristotle wrote that more than 2,300 years ago, and the belief that creativity requires a touch of madness remains popular to this day.
Indeed, researchers have recently begun to find associations between certain psychiatric disorders and some measures of artistic success. But many psychologists insist that the capacity to create depends on personality features that read like a textbook profile of mental health.
It is a paradox that itself demands creative skills to fathom. “How can the maladjustment of many great creative minds be reconciled with the assertion that they are in some respects unusually healthy?” asks Robert Prentky, a Boston University psychologist and author of “Creativity and Psychopathology.”
Part of the answer seems to be that while a disproportionate number of creative writers and artists have been diagnosed as having a mood disorder, it is their reservoir of psychological strength that allows them to turn these emotional difficulties into something that can move or inspire others.
In fact, when specialists look closely at the small group of manic-depressives who are especially creative, they find that it is during the periods of relative normality that these individuals usually do their best work.
Besides straightforward depression, the major disturbance of affect--or mood--is manic-depression, or “bipolar” disorder, in which depression alternates with periods of mania--that is, euphoria and frenzied activity. New studies have documented a statistical relationship between this disorder and certain forms of creative accomplishment.
Last year, psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen published an update of her 15-year-old survey of faculty members at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Of 30 established creative writers, 24 had at some time been diagnosed with an affective disorder--a rate nearly three times greater than that for a matched group of 30 other professionals of nearly identical age, IQ and educational background.
At least as remarkable was Andreasen’s finding that the writers’ parents and siblings were also much more likely than the general population to have had a psychological disorder as well as to have reached an impressive level of creative achievement. “The families of the writers were riddled with both creativity and mental illness,” Andreasen says.
These results echo a 1983 study of 47 leading British artists and writers conducted by Kay Jamison, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Eighteen of them, or 38%, had been treated for an affective disorder. Fully half of the poets she questioned had been hospitalized or received medication for such a problem.
By contrast, about 1% of the general population is diagnosed as having bipolar disorder and at least 5% as being seriously depressed.
A similar association was found in yet another research project by Hagop Akiskal, professor of psychiatry at the University of Tennessee. Seventy percent of his sample of famous Parisian painters, musicians, and writers were prone to mood swings, and more than half had been treated for the problem.
Such studies seem to bear out the pattern of creative individuals whose breakdowns or suicides have become legend. Artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, composers such as Robert Schumann and George Frederick Handel, poets like Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell and writers as diverse as Edgar Allen Poe and Sylvia Plath, are only a few of the examples often cited.
Several reasons have been proposed for the connection between mood disorders and creativity. First, manic states can heighten the senses, accelerate the flow of ideas, and reduce the need for sleep. “Such people have a higher energy level,” Jamison explained in an interview. “They think faster.”
Second, both elation and depression can provide good material for creative work--a variety of sensations to be explored artistically, says Teresa Amabile, a Brandeis University psychologist who specializes in the study of creativity.
Third, there might be a genetic link. While this is highly speculative--and there is surely no gene for poetry or sculpture, per se--researchers are excited by findings that relatives of creative subjects are themselves very creative.
While Andreasen and Jamison each found high levels of psychological disorders among those known to be creative, researchers Ruth Richards and Dennis Kinney of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., found higher creativity among those known to have psychological disorders.
Richards and Kinney recently gave a newly devised pencil-and-paper test for creativity to 33 people with mood disorders and 11 of their normal relatives. All, including the relatives, scored slightly higher than a control group.
“Since it runs in families, and the form of creativity is different (between writers and their relatives), that suggests to me that what you’re seeing is not learned behavior,” Andreasen says. “It’s probably genetically transmitted.”
But what is the “it” that may have a genetic component? Andreasen emphasizes that psychological disorders in themselves do not lead to higher creativity. “It’s not the illness that makes people more creative. It’s that they have a fundamental cognitive style that makes them more creative and also makes them more susceptible to illness.”
Researchers use words like openness, sensitivity, and intensity to describe that style.
Ernest Hartmann, a Tufts University psychiatrist, calls it “thin boundaries.” In the course of studying hundreds of nightmare sufferers, he found that those who experience more than their share of unpleasant dreams also had a history of being easily hurt, extremely aware of their own feelings and those of others.
“They’re especially vulnerable to stress, loss and rejection--which are known as precipitants of mental illness,” Hartmann said in an interview. But thin boundaries are also found in people who “would tend to become artists if they had any talent.”
Because creativity and manic-depressive disorder seem to be only indirectly related, virtually all researchers join Andreasen in denying any necessary connection between madness and art.
“I don’t believe that the vast proportion of creative people are or were psychotic,” Prentky says.
Conversely, notes Frank Barron, a psychologist at UC Santa Cruz who has studied creativity for nearly three decades, “There are lots of manic-depressives who don’t manifest any creativity. If you go into a hospital, you don’t find eccentric people, you find apathetic, pathetic sick people.”
When Barron gives personality tests to original thinkers, he finds that they sometimes score high on measures of abnormality but also on measures of “ego strength.” The latter he translates as “persistence, a sense of reality in the midst of all the confusion, the ability to plan and to right yourself after you’ve been bounced one way or the other.”
In fact, adds Andreasen, creative people seem to do their best work between episodes of mania and depression. “They don’t do well when their mood isn’t normal. They’re too disorganized when they’re high and too despondent when they’re depressed.”
Even disturbed creators like Schumann “were not psychotic at the time they were highly creative,” says Prentky. “Active psychosis is inconsistent with the production of constructive, creative activity.”
Psychoanalysts have made this point for many years: artists must be able to leave the everyday world of rationality and inhibitions behind for a while in order to tap the primitive, unconscious realm. But they must also be able to return to the “real world” so as to shape, integrate and evaluate what they have done.
Still other qualifications have been offered to studies showing a relationship between psychological problems and creativity. First, says Jamison, “There’s no evidence for an association with other kinds of mental illness”--including schizophrenia.
Second, many varieties of creativity, such as original scientific thinking, seem unrelated to mood disorders. Jamison’s and Andreasen’s work have focused only on writers and some visual artists.
Third, commenting on his Paris study, Akiskal says, “You don’t find severe mental illness (among the creative people); you find milder affective temperaments.”
In another research project, he looked at a group of 750 psychiatric patients. Of those diagnosed with mild mood swings, 8% turned out to be relatively well-known artists. Virtually no artists turned up among the patients who were treated for more serious bipolar disorder, simple depression or schizophrenia.
Finally, there is the possibility that being a creator, particularly in a society that doesn’t always value the process or the product, can cause (or at least worsen) psychological problems.
“Artists are often mavericks whose pursuits isolate them from the mainstream,” says Peter Ostwald, a San Francisco psychiatrist and author of a study of Robert Schumann entitled “The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius.” “I see a close relationship between the difficult life style of a person and the development of anger, frustration and depression.”
Andreasen, too, muses that rather than mental illness causing artistic talent, “The relationship is as often in the opposite direction: being creative may make one more susceptible to periods of depression.”
Asked to describe the psychological profile most likely to produce creativity, psychologist and author Howard Gardner says, “I’d bet on health--especially in the long run.”
