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Creativity and Psychopathology

This post was inspired by the following article:  Everyday Creativity, Eminent Creativity, and Psychopathology

There is a lost-standing association between creativity and mental illness. A number of famous and esteemed artists have been known to have suffered from mental illnesses - Vincent Van Gogh struggled with depression, Virginia Woolf with bipolar disorder, and so on.

Hans Eysenck proposed a theory of personality based on three dimensions: Intraversion/Extraversion, Neuroticism/Stability, and Psychoticism/Socialization. Neuroticism, or high levels of negative affect, is supposed to be a risk factor for some psychological disorders, particularly mood disorders. Interestingly, some claim that this dimension is also correlated with art and creativity. In fact Eysenck himself suggested a relationship between personality and creativity, in an article that can be found here, although his focus was more on the dimension of psychoticism than neuroticism.

It is important at this juncture to differentiate between types of creativity. 'Everyday creativity' refers to the kind of creativity you use to solve problems in everyday life. For instance, tying two badminton rackets together to knock something off a high shelf would be a display of everyday creativity.
Eminent creativity, on the other hand, refers to the type of creativity that, ideally, brings you awards and recognition. In other words, the creative arts, such as painting and creative writing. The writers note that everyday creativity is overlooked in research, especially in favor of eminent creativity, and there is a greater focus on the former in this article.

It's easy to see why everyday creativity is overshadowed by its more glorified counterpart, even in research. The idea of more emotional people, or people with a higher tendency to experience negative emotions like worry or sadness, being artists feels intuitive - to the extent that that the archetypal 'tortured artist' to channels his inner pain into incredible artworks is one that is not only normalized but also romanticized in pop culture. There are many who even ask whether Van Gogh's work would have been as beautiful had he been healthier. The answer is yes - in fact, Starry Night, one of his most famous and stunning pieces, was painted when he was being treated at an asylum, during a period of recovery. The painting depicts the view from his room in that asylum.

However, the writers of the paper linked above, however, did not focus too much on eminent creativity. Instead, the worked on the relationship between pathology and everyday creativity. This is particularly interesting also because they view everyday creativity as an evolutionary advantage, i.e. something that is fairly prevalent throughout the population - unlike psychological disorders.

In the above paper by Taylor and Francis, the researchers did in fact find a link between everyday creativity and bipolar disorder.  To do so they developed their own scales, the Lifetime Creativity Scales, based largely on originality and meaningfulness to others. Using these scales, the researchers found that subjects who had a family history of bipolar disorder had a creative advantage over the control group, who did not.
However, they propose that this is a manifestation of a "motivational effect". By this they mean that certain factors or traits present in individuals with a genetic predisposition towards bipolar disorder might enhance their creativity.

And the conclusion this leads one to is that this diathesis for bipolar disorder affords, or afforded, individuals some kind of evolutionary advantage.
This is a counter-intuitive claim, to say the least. The writer of the paper fails to clarify this point or even suggest any possible explanations, stating only that such an advantage would have to occur at the level of the 'everyday' individual, which is already obvious. This is a significant limitation of the article.

The paper goes on to discuss in brief other elements of creativity, such as creative motivation or social responsibility, and their intersection with mental health. However, it also attempts to explore the implications of the correlation in terms of the general population.

Bipolar disorder affects about 5%, approximately, of the total population. Since the creative advantage also appears to extend to those with the genotype, the results of this study may actually affect around 10% of the total population. Bipolar disorder also affects men and women almost equally, which lends credibility to the paper's conclusion, since creativity too does not depend on gender, and everyday creativity in particular is nearly universal.

But this universality raises another question - if even the genotype for bipolar disorder affects only around 10% of the population, what about the rest of us? Here too, the writer dismisses this issue by stating that there must be more than one route to creativity, without going into further detail or explaining what stands out about this correlation between bipolar disorder and everyday creativity at all if there are multiple routes anyway. The universality of creativity is a serious limitation of this paper, one that is only exacerbated by its vagueness around these issues.

However, on the whole, the article explores a fascinating topic, and has an interesting take on it at that. Ultimately, it seems creativity really is linked to psychological disorders, although the research is far from complete.

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