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Mad Genius: Creativity and Psychopathology

Shubhangi Banerjee

No great mind has existed without a touch of madness.
-Aristotle
            Prominent individuals like Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Robert Schumann, John Nash and many more in the creative field have battled with mental health issues like depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, etc. Inquisitiveness about the notion of ‘Mad Genius’ has been the source of numerous debates on the association of creativity and mental disorders. This has led to countless empirical studies and research papers through the years, thereby making one question if these two aspects are the two sides of the same coin. This paper aims to discuss and analyse the extent of the creativity-psychopathology link by presenting results from a selective range of empirical studies from the 1980s and 2000s till recent years.
The Berkeley’s Institute for Personality Assessment & Research conducted MMPI tests (in 1960s) for creative writers and architects and found that they had elevated scores for schizophrenia and paranoia, often reporting unusual perceptual occurrences and odd mystical experiences. (Barron, 1969 as cited in Degmecic, 2018) Shelley Carson discusses the following empirical studies in her article: Andreasen (1987) compares writers from the Iowa Writers Workshop and their first-degree relatives to a matched control group. Findings suggest that 80% of these writers suffered from mood disorders and were 4 times more likely to suffer from bipolarity than control subjects. Post (1994) used general-population demographics as control subjects and found that his subjects (291 world-famous men from different creative professional categories) exhibited increased rates of undifferentiated mood disorders. Richards et al. (1988) noted that subjects with cyclothymia and their first-degree relatives with bipolar disorder had higher creativity scores than either non-disordered control subjects/ subjects with bipolarity. Carson propounded ‘shared vulnerability model’ which states: both creative and mentally-disturbed individuals share factors like cognitive disinhibition, stronger attention to novelty & neural hyper-connectivity. She argues that these vulnerabilities enhance creativity in the presence of high IQ, cognitive flexibility, etc. (Carson, 2011 as cited in Acar et al., p.2) Degmecic argues that creativity and mental illness involve ‘heightened capacity and inclination to produce numerous ideas/associations’, differing in a way that psychologically-healthy creative persons can control the flow and select and develop the flow of novel ideas, while schizophrenic/ bipolar patients cannot do so. (p.225) A case-control study using longitudinal Swedish registries in which prevalence of creative occupations in patients and non-diagnosed relatives was compared with matched population controls. “Except for bipolar disorder, individuals with creative professions weren’t more likely to suffer from investigated psychiatric disorders than controls. Creative professions and first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anorexia nervosa, and for siblings of patients with autism were linked.” (Kyaga et al., 2012) Daniel Nettle (2006) administered the O-LIFE schizotypy scales to a composite sample of control participants, poets, visual artists, mathematicians and individuals with history of psychiatric disorder. “Poets and artists have levels of unusual experiences higher than controls and as high as schizophrenia patients. However, they are relatively low on introvertive anhedonia and avolition dimensions. Different domains of creativity require different cognitive profiles, with poetry and art associated with divergent thinking, schizophrenia and affective disorder; and mathematics associated with convergent thinking and autism.” Acar et al. (2017) investigated creativity-schizophrenia link with a 3-level meta-analytic approach. Analyses with 200 effect-sizes were obtained from 42 studies. It focused on moderators- type and content of creativity measure, severity of schizophrenia and patient status. When these results were compared with previous meta-analysis findings, creativity and psychopathology indicated an inverted-U relationship. Thus, mild expressions of schizophrenia symptoms support creativity, but full-blown symptoms undermine it. (p.1)
Although new and advanced research methodologies have developed over the years and new data-sets are being investigated, the link between creativity and psychopathology have continued to spur debates. One can only refer to, but cannot fully rely on the studies and investigations done in the past (around 1960s to early 2000s). Even though quite a few of them are informative and make some crucial arguments, not all are valid due to reasons like biases in the tests, focus on particular geographical/ population studies or simply a lack of strong scientific and empirical backing. Over the years, there have been new ideas and perceptions of creativity and its manifestations as well as changing conceptions and criteria of mental disorders. Therefore, even with abundance of literature on this topic, there is a need for future research because it seems that there are more avenues to be explored and more possibilities and answers to this phenomenon.


References
1.     Degmecic, Dunja. (2018). Schizophrenia and Creativity. Psychiatria Danubina, 2018; Vol. 30, Suppl. 4, pp S224-227. Retrieved from: http://www.psychiatria-danubina.com/UserDocsImages/pdf/dnb_vol30_sup4/dnb_vol30_sup4_224.pdf

2.     Acar, S., Chen, X., & Cayirdag, N. (2017). Schizophrenia and Creativity: A Meta-Analytic Review. Schizophrenia International Research Society. Retrieved from: https://daneshyari.com/article/preview/6821162.pdf

3.     Kyaga, S., Landen, M., Boman, M., Hultman, C., Langstrom, N. & Lichtenstein, P. (2012). Mental illness, suicide and creativity: 40-Year prospective total population study. Journal of Psychiatric Research. Elsevier Ltd. Retrieved from: https://www.scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Kyaga-et-al.-2012.pdf

4.     Carson, Shelley H. (2011). Creativity and Psychopathology: A Shared Vulnerability Model. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, Vol 56, No. 3. Retrieved from: https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Carson-IR.pdf

5.     Nettle, Daniel. (2006). Schizotypy and Mental Health amongst poets, visual artists and mathematicians. Journal of Research in Personality 40 (2006) 876–890 Retrieved from: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.594.1554&rep=rep1&type=pdf

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