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The Myth of the Mad Genius

 Vedika Puri


“We of the craft are all crazy. Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.”- Lord Byron (Goodreads)


The stereotypical belief of ‘depressed artists’ and ‘mad scientists’ has for long been propagated by popular culture and has led to the development of much beloved characters like Will Hunting, James Moriarty, and Nina Sayers. In fact, the link between creativity and psychopathology has ancient roots since it was Aristotle who first wrote that philosophers, poets and artists all have tendencies toward “melancholia” (Bailey 2003). Despite such a widespread acceptance of the association between creativity and mental illness, this post aims to debunk the myth by challenging the existing proof to date.

Three psychiatrists have provided much of the widely referenced evidence for the link between creativity and psychopathology. In 1987, Nancy Andreasen compared the rate of mental illness in writers and their families with that of a non-writer control group and concluded that 80% of writers had mood disorders, compared with only 30% of non-writers (Schlesinger
2009). In a 1989 study, Kay Redfield Jamison interviewed 47 award-winning English poets, playwrights, novelists, biographers, and visual artists. She found that 38% of her ‘creatives’ had sought treatment for affective illness; a rate she reports as 30 times greater than the general population’s. In her book, Jamison also concludes that a “huge body of scientific evidence” proves that “the most creative composers and writers and artists in fact suffer disproportionately from depression and manic depression” (Schlesinger
2009). Thirdly, Arnold Ludwig in his book ‘The Price of Greatness’ provided immense data on creative madness by examining the lives of 1004 famous people (Schlesinger
2009).

 During the past 31 years, these writings have become so revered that few people spend much time with the originals and instead cite these works without any challenge or critique. In reality, they fail to see that Andreasen and Jamison’s works are prone to the confounding risks of subjectivity and experimenter bias while Ludwig’s book is fraught with inconsistencies and vagueness (Schlesinger
2009). In fact, the entire thesis of the creative mentally ill relies on case reports and anecdotal storytelling and not on empirical evidence.
If numbers are to be considered, then mental illness, unlike genius, is not a rare phenomenon. In 2001, the CDC estimated that there were some 450 million people living in poor mental health when the world's population stood at 6.2 billion. The lifetime incidence of people suffering from mental health issues is significantly over 50% while the number of creative geniuses, irrespective of how we define them, is vastly less. It occurs at the exceedingly rare rate of 1 per 1 million individuals, which implies that there are fewer than 7000 geniuses on the entire planet (Kaplan 2014).

Therefore, people commit base rate fallacy by tending to focus on specific information while ignoring generic, baseline information. They greatly underestimate the probability of a genius being totally sane and greatly overestimate the probability of a mentally ill individual being creative. The reality is that a very large proportion of creative people have no pathological symptoms (Dietrich 2014).


The error in thinking does not end there because many also commit another cognitive bias. Availability Heuristic is a mental shortcut that estimates the likelihood of an event by the ease with which a specific instance of it comes to mind. Thus when one thinks about the creativity-psychopathology link, the odd cases of many famous people are more likely to guide one than the 99% media-invisible normal (Dietrich 2014). Van Gogh’s ear mutilation, Beethoven’s Bipolar Disorder, Hemingway’s alcoholism and Sylvia Plath’s suicide are just a few of the anecdotes that fuel the belief that creativity is closely associated with mental illness.
Availability heuristic also causes illusionary correlations because it leads to the perception of a non-existent relationship between two events simply because they occurred together at some point in the past (Dietrich 2014).  As the pairings between creativity and mental illness are so vivid, more people combine the events and overestimate the frequency of their correlation. This faulty logic is then complete with confirmation bias; the tendency people have of confirming their existing beliefs. Cases that support the belief of the creative mentally ill strengthen the imaginary connection while cases that violate or disconfirm the connection are blatantly ignored.

Thus, one does not have enough proof to conclude that there is a real link between mental illness and creativity. Contradictorily, psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg, after studying Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners, has argued that mental illnesses disrupts the cognitive and emotional processes necessary for successful creativity (Bailey 2003). Therefore, until further scientific assessment proves that a creativity-psychopathology link exists, one cannot help but accept Maslow and Rogers’ view that creative imagination is the symbol of a well adjusted, self-actualizing, and fully functioning person.












References:



A quote by Lord Byron. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9013514-we-of-the-craft-are-all-crazy-some-are-affected.


Bailey, D. S. (2003, November). The 'Sylvia Plath' effect. Retrieved December 15, 2019, from https://www.apa.org/monitor/nov03/plath.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (CDC). (2001). Available online at: http://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/basics/burden.htm

Dietrich, A. (2014, February 26). The mythconception of the mad genius. Retrieved December 14, 2019, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3935122/.


Kaplan, A. (2014, April 17). Creativity and Mental Illness. Retrieved December 14, 2019, from https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/neuropsychiatry/creativity-and-mental-illness/page/0/2.


Schlesinger, J. (2009). Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.






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