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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