Creativity and Madness: What science tells us about creative genius and mental illness
In her autobiography An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison chronicles her experience with Manic Depression or Bipolar Disorder. An accomplished clinical psychologist, writer, and professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, she captures the essence of creativity and madness as follows, “…when you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars …feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes…everything previously moving with the grain is now against– you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind…it will never end, for madness carves its own reality.”
Throughout history there have been many examples of the inextricable link between creative genius and mental illness. Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Vincent Van Gogh, John Nash – their contributions and struggles highlight how many innovative minds have a history of early life trauma and psychological instability. But does the link between creativity and mental illness extend beyond a few case examples? A recent 40-year prospective total population study by Kyaga et al. (2012) examined the relationship between mental illness, creativity, and suicide. Researchers found that mental illness did not increase the probability of entering into a creative profession. However, the siblings of individuals with Autism and first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and anorexia nervosa were significantly overrepresented in creative fields. Some believe that inheriting the positive, but not the debilitating aspects of mental illness, may lead to greater creative potential. Specifically, researchers have linked creativity to positive schizotypal personality traits such as unusual perceptual experiences, weak boundaries between self and other, nonconformity, and magical beliefs. According to Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson, the biological link between creative and mentally ill individuals is cognitive disinhibition, or the failure to keep useless information out of conscious awareness. For individuals with a mental disorder, this cognitive disinhibition may lead to delusional thoughts, mental confusion, and disorganization, whereas an abundance of information may facilitate the creative process for those who are creatively inclined. Carson suggests that there is a shared vulnerability between creativity and psychopathology, whereby reduced inhibition (linked to the neurotransmitter Dopamine) can interact with protective or stressful factors to produce novel ideas or psychosis. As heredity goes, the biological link between creativity and mental illness is modulated by complex environmental factors which warrant further research.