Manasa Veluvali
The association between artists and poor mental health is romanticised and glorified all too often, a toxic side-effect of which is treating mental illness almost as a prerequisite for artistic masterpieces. You’re not a good enough artist unless you have an inner turmoil fuelling itself into creative outbursts. Or, you are not making the most of your mental illness until you use it to create something that validates your struggle in this consumerist world. The conclusions you could draw from their (posited) correlation are several, and will be the focus of this blog post.
There is an urge among researchers to establish a link between mental illness and creativity, starting with Cesare Lombroso’s The Man of Genius (1888), which explored the ‘artistic genius’ as a hereditary illness. One must keep in mind that there are great artists and geniuses who have not had mental illnesses, and there are people with mental illnesses who are not necessarily geniuses in the way popular culture defines the term.
In an article titled "What Neuroscience Has to Say About the ‘Tortured Genius'," Sarah Klein delineates the major findings of research in this field of study, whilst pointing out that there are aspects of each study which make the findings unconvincing. These range from small sample sizes, to difficulty defining creativity, and to not knowing where to pinpoint creativity in the brain. (There is already a post on this blog regarding the issue of the operationalisation of creativity.) My contention here is not with the results of these studies, whether well designed or not, but with the very urge to establish a relationship between artistic brilliance and mental illness in the first place. The consequences of such studies on popular perception are serious, and toxic.
Klein quotes Keith Sawyer, Ph.D., on what positive outcomes could possibly emerge from these studies, who says, “I think if you’re treating people it can helpful in therapy to tell your patient that their mental illness has a silver lining…that’s where their willingness to believe in a link comes from.” However, this ‘silver lining’ has more negative effects than are apparent. The article goes on to quote the artist Ellen Forney, who said she questioned if she “wanted to be a stable person” by utilising the medication prescribed to treat her bipolar disorder. She claims to have been prey to the ‘crazy artist’ trope, which resulted in her stalling her recovery from her mental illness. However, now on medication, she values her stability, for “a part of [her] creativity is productivity.” Stalling recovery with the intention of letting your career flourish is flawed logic but, nonetheless, common logic.
What is it about our culture that forces people to choose their (supposedly) mental-illness-fuelled art over their well-being? Undoubtedly, art has inspired empathy in sufferers of mental illness and otherwise. There is no dearth of examples of artists who battled mental illness, only to have their illness and struggle romanticised posthumously (if not while they are alive). What any romanticisation of such art and the artist misses is that mental illness is primarily debilitating, rather than being a source of inspiration itself. But when we are quick to laud an artist’s greatness because of their mental illness, we further stall another such artist from recovery.
Are people suffering from mental illnesses supposed to create something ‘profitable’ from their struggle? A bestselling book, perhaps, or a TED talk? Why do we insist on finding a consumable by-product that validates someone’s struggle with an illness, something that makes it “worth it”? What does this say about how we value those who are mentally ill? All this does is tell people that their illness is only worth attention if it generates profit in some way or the other. With that same logic, are we not to value those who suffer from a mental illness and cannot be more than minimally functional? We have been conditioned into thinking that simply making it through an illness, or learning to cope with it, is nothing. One needs to go beyond that, make their struggle something you can put on the market. This added pressure is perverted, and wholly unnecessary.
We need not romanticise mental illness, or even the struggle against mental illness. What we ought to do, however, is stop obsessing about productivity. Especially when someone’s productivity is hampered by their illness. Appreciating someone’s persistence or perseverance in their struggle against an illness could be just that; it need not escalate to being churned into a romantic tale of defeating your demons (that will no doubt become a Netflix series), and it most definitely need not require gleaning the silver lining from one’s struggle, that ‘emancipatory’ aspect of the illness that makes it all ‘worth it.’
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