Number of Studies Growing : Madness and Creativity: Scientists Hunt for Links
For centuries, people have talked about a connection between creativity and madness.
Socrates and Winston Churchill, Edgar Allan Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Michelangelo and Vincent Van Gogh. They are but a few of the highly creative individuals who are known to have suffered from some form of mental illness.
But it was not until two years ago that an American researcher published the first scientific article demonstrating, to the satisfaction of scientists, that a connection did indeed exist between creativity and mental disorders.
Since then a number of other studies have been published. At least three books are being written. And now researchers are trying to explore what appears to be a genetic link between creativity and mental illness.
In trying to unravel the biological and physiological mysteries that surround creativity, scientists have found that artists and writers--especially poets and novelists--are much more prone to mania and depression than the general population. Ordinary people who are not necessarily known for their creativity but clearly exhibit signs of it have also been found in unusually high numbers to suffer from mild cases of mental illness.
Even more intriguing are recent studies showing that, while many creative people have a predilection to mental problems, their relatives appear to be even more highly susceptible to severe depressions or crippling manic attacks.
One emerging theory is that creativity may be nature’s way of helping individuals overcome a genetic predisposition to mental disease. If so, this could have profound implications not only on the study of creativity but on the practice of psychiatry as well. The research may also pose some knotty ethical questions about how to treat mental illness without dampening the creative drive.
Dr. Nancy C. Andreasen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa College of Medicine was the first to document the connection between creativity and mental illness in a landmark 1987 study.
But she was not the first to notice the connection. Even Aristotle, in ancient Greece, had observed it: “(All) of those who have been famous for their genius . . . have been inclined to insanity,” he said.
Before becoming a physician, Andreasen was a literary scholar. She couldn’t help notice the number of suicides among writers. In the 20th Century alone, there had been Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf.
Had these writers been mentally ill?
Or were there simply some similarities between creative people and mentally deranged ones? As Roy Thurston, a Los Angeles artist, put it recently: “Creativity is being aware of the boundaries and going beyond them. Mental illness is just not being aware of boundaries.”
Modern Criteria
Unlike earlier research efforts, Andreasen used modern psychiatric diagnostic criteria to assess the mental health of creative people. She chose as her subjects 30 faculty members at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, the country’s oldest and one of its most notable writing schools.
What Andreasen had expected to find when she began her work in the 1970s was a slightly higher than normal incidence of schizophrenia. To her surprise, the writers she studied did not exhibit the symptoms she expected--delusions, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts and the loss of sense of self.
Instead of schizophrenia, 80% of them exhibited depression or had some other form of mood disorder. Only 30% of a control group of non-writers suffered from mood disorders. Nearly half of the writers--43%--were diagnosed as having one of the most serious forms of mood disorders--manic depression--compared to a rate of 10% among the control subjects.
In the worst cases, patients suffered episodes of uncontrollable hyperactivity, often accompanied by grandiose delusions and long periods of incapacitating and often suicidal depression.
At the time, Andreasen warned that her findings, while statistically significant, were not necessarily relevant to other types of creativity. But last spring her observations were bolstered by a study involving writers and artists conducted by Kay Redfield Jamison, an associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.
Jamison analyzed the work patterns and mental health status of 47 of England’s most highly honored poets, novelists, playwrights, artists and biographers. More than a third, she found, had sought treatment for mental-health problems--a rate about 30 times that of the general population.
One of the most revealing patterns that emerged from the British study was the sharp contrast between those writers who dealt in fiction and those who dealt with fact.
While about a third of the poets and novelists reported having either severe mood swings or extended, elated mood states, none of the biographers reported significant shifts in mood. A handful of the biographers had taken anti-depressants at some time in their lives, but they did not seem subjected to what Jamison calls the “creative fire” that was reported by so many of the others in the study.
Similarly, scientists do not seem to be as prone to mental illness as do other creative people, perhaps because of the more rigid nature of scientific research, which requires at least some measure of stability and predictability.
Although there have yet to be any systematic studies, Jamison believes that truly gifted political and corporate leaders may have mental disorders and mood patterns similar to those of poets and artists.
Truly gifted leaders, Jamison said, tend to share many of the characteristics that are exhibited by manics: high energy, enthusiasm, intense emotions, charisma, gregariousness, extroversion, self-aggrandizement, optimism, heightened alertness, fearlessness, decisiveness, sleeplessness.
Although there have been “relatively few overtly psychotic political and military leaders,” she says, there have been any of a number who would surely be diagnosed as having some form of abnormal swings in moods. Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini all suffered from some form of mood disorder, Jamison said.
Dr. Ruth Richards, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and a researcher at the Mailman Research Center at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., has also been working in this field. Details of her work, which is the result of a collaboration with her colleague Dennis K. Kinney, is also scheduled to be published shortly in a book titled “Creativity and the Healthy Mind.”
‘Everyday Creativity’
Rather than studying famous people and trying to assess their mental states, Richards and Kinney have taken a different tack. They have been trying to identify individuals and families with a history of mental disease and then assess their levels of creativity.
To do so, the researchers evaluated what they call “everyday creativity.” Without revealing precisely what it was they were looking for, the researchers asked a group of subjects detailed questions about work patterns and leisure habits. People who tended to do things in imaginative, unusual ways scored high on the scales of everyday creativity. Those who worked or played in predictable ways scored low. For example, an auto mechanic who was especially clever in solving problems and who designed his own tools or invented new uses for old tools would receive a very high rating, whereas a painter, even a gifted one, who simply made copies of originals would get a rather low score.
Using these scales, Richards and Kinney have found some intriguing connections between creativity and mental illness.
It was not those with extreme cases of manic depression who tended to be the most creative. Rather, it was the relatives of those who were mentally ill--people who themselves exhibited only mild signs of mental illness or, in some cases, no symptoms--who were the most creative.
Researchers had already determined that manic depression seemed to be a genetically inherited characteristic, passed along in families from one generation to the next. Maybe, Richards theorized, there were similar genetic or biological predispositions for creativity. And just maybe, creativity and manic depression were somehow linked, so that a person who was susceptible to mental illness was also predisposed to creativity.
Such genetic links seemed to exist elsewhere in nature. For example, scientists had long wondered why sickle cell anemia, which is such a debilitating and often fatal disease, didn’t die off with its victims long ago. The reason, they now believe, is that, for some reason, this devastating form of anemia seems to be genetically coupled to an immunity to malaria. As a result, individuals who are not stricken with sickle cell but are merely carriers of it are also blessed with a much-needed immunity to malaria, which has long been one of the most pervasive and virulent diseases facing the human population.
Just as an immunity to malaria seems to offer a kind of “compensatory advantage” for the carriers of sickle cell, Richards said, so creativity may be a form of compensation for those who are carriers of the genes that predispose individuals to mental disorders.
The apparent connection between mental illness and creativity raises complex medical and ethical issues, which scientists have not even begun to resolve, said Jamison in a chapter on creativity in a forthcoming medical text published by Oxford University Press.
Traditionally, psychiatrists and psychologists have treated manic depression with medication and psychotherapy and, in so doing, ignored the potentially creative aspects of the manic stages of the disease, which they viewed as destructive.
Scientists are moving closer to being able to identify the genetic markers for mental illness. This means they soon will be able to spot fetuses and even recently conceived embryos that are at a high risk of mental disease, in much the same way that Down’s syndrome, spina bifida, Tay-Sachs disease and other devastating genetic abnormalities are identified by such simple medical procedures as amniocentesis and chorionic villous sampling.
This leads Richards and other experts to wondering if, in trying to dull the pain of mental illness, scientists might inadvertently destroy its beneficial side effects.
