creativity and mental illness

by Jiin, Lee

Have you heard about ‘the pain of creation’? Creating something is not easy work. Whenever I do my homeworks from writing classes, I feel tortured. I believe you have experienced this kind of painful feeling at least once. Sometimes, when the aforesaid feeling is accumulated so long, it develops to the mental illness. In general, artists who have to create something new all the time complain of the mental diseases. This can be illustrated by Vincent van Gogh’s story that he cut of his ear after an argument with his friend Paul Gauguin, and finally killed himself. In his diary, he says “I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me. Now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause.” He was becoming mad.

According to the article ‘The dark side of creativity: Depression + anxiety x madness = genius?’ written by William Lee Adams for CNN, psychologists have tried to find the relationship between creativity and madness for decades. As a matter of fact, well-known artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch suffered from mental problems. Studies recently have presented that people whose work asks for great creativities were more likely to have mental problems such as bipolarity. Researches also indicate that there could be an inherited trait that increases creativity and mental disorder. However, the writer says that we cannot be sure that all creativities contribute to mental illness because there are other studies that counter this idea. For instance, Kyaga, the Swedish academic, claims that artists such as dancers, directors, and visual artists point out that they have less frequent mental illnesses than the general people.

From my perspective, I partially agree on the assertion that creativities related to the madness. I often hear that most of artists are crazy and it is true that some artists suffer from mental illness. Therefore, it might be true that there is certain relationship between creativity and mental disorder. However, as there are also many artists who don’t seem to have the foregoing problem, we cannot accept it as a fact, but we can be more concerned about this problem and prepare solutions.

 

The dark side of creativity: Depression + anxiety x madness = genius? (01/22/14), William Lee Adams, CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/22/world/the-dark-side-of-creativity-vincent-van-gogh/index.html?hpt=wo_mid