A Fit of an Inspired Creativity-Infused Delirium
Creativity and Mental Illness
Creativity. That brilliance, that inspired ingenuity to construct something novel out of all that is formless. A concept, a strategy, an image, a tune, or perhaps something that stuns in its corporeality, brought to life by way of firing brain cells. Creativity is a much admired and plenty sought after talent or skill; its proceeds lauded and held in high regard.
Creativity is evident in the arts, the sciences, the languages, and the humanities, proceeding from the minds and hands of the inspired. Its provenance is unknown. There have been studies—twin genetic studies, imaging studies to map the culprit components of the brain that fuel genius, and even heritability trees to determine which descendants bear the aptitude of a standout ancestor, how much of it and towards what applications.
Amid this search (and perhaps in serendipity), studies have shown an association between creativity and mental illness. We are yet to know whether one causes or is a consequence of the other. However, in some cases, there appears to be a correlation between creativity and mental illness, when the person is symptomatic, or even in remission when symptoms quiet down. In her book Touched With Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison says, “Talents for eloquence, poetry, music and painting, and uncommon ingenuity in several of the mechanical arts, are often involved in this state of madness […].”
Creativity may be regarded as a transcendence of what is regulated or established. Novelty by definition is creating something new, never before observed or experienced. This is a likely reason that some of the mentally ill excel as creatives. Creativity is linked to disinhibition, and the latter espouses the state of being mentally ill. An unhinged mind, or one loosely tethered, senses and experiences its environs differently. It is less bound to logic and familiarity. What it produces is deemed radical and illogical; this is the quintessence of genius.
Bipolar disorder has been shown to widely correlate with creativity. Vincent van Gogh was one of the most famed painters associated with the age of post-impressionism. Lord Byron was a highly regarded English poet and a prominent figure of the Romantic period. Robert Lowell was an American poet, a champion of the Postmodernist movement and a winner of the Pulitzer prize. In Jamison’s learned opinion—arrived at by gleaning historical accounts and drawing genealogy trees—these individuals suffered from bipolar disorder, or manic-depressive illness as it was previously known. Lowell was diagnosed with it and had a history of hospitalizations with lofty mood manias and crippling depression.
Some individuals with schizophrenia are also creative standouts. John Forbes Nash was a mathematician who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He suffered from schizophrenia, having paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations which heavily stunted his middle years. A biopic based on his life, titled A Beautiful Mind, details his struggles.
Autism is a widely known neurodevelopmental illness that inhibits the development of children, both in behavior and in cognition. However, high-functioning autistics may display high IQ levels, especially in logic and pattern completion, yet may suffer from poor communication skills and may lack the social smarts to associate with others.
Of course, there are creatives who will pass just about any test of normalcy (within reasonable bounds perhaps). For every reclusive Steve Jobs there’s a gregarious Bill Gates. For every Elon Musk who’s on the spectrum, there’s a Jim Farley spurring Ford to compete with Tesla. But there is a link. An as yet elucidated link between creativity and mental illness.