I have written several posts about creativity (here, here, and here), all of which touched briefly on the common belief that great creative works are often products of a disturbed mind. In this post I will explore the idea in greater detail. Vincent Van Gogh is often cited as the exemplar of this linkage -- the painting above is one of his last. It conveys a certain eerie or threatening quality despite its beauty, and it was painted in the same month that he died by suicide at the age of 37. That was about a year and a half after the well-known incident where Van Gogh cut off part of his own ear and sent it to a cleaning girl at a brothel that he often visited, which resulted in his temporary institutionalization at a French asylum. Clearly Van Gogh was not mentally well. The supposed linkage of genius and madness, however, suggests that his mental illness was directly related to the quality of his art.
Besides extreme cases like Van Gogh, some researchers have argued that all artists' creativity is based on mental processes that closely resemble mental illness. Rothenberg, for instance, is a modern researcher arguing for the idea that creative thinking is "divergent" or "nonlinear" -- an old idea that in some aspects resembles psychosis. Although I agree with Rothenberg that creative activity arises from the Intuitive Mind (and then undergoes some "reality testing" by the Narrative Mind to meet pre-specified parameters and artistic conventions), I am more convinced by Weisberg's argument that creative thought is a lot like other forms of thought. A creator's Intuitive Mind produces work that is derived from his or her prior experiences and practiced skills. What might appear "divergent" to an outside observer is actually perfectly consistent with that individual creator's background and abilities.
If creative thinking is not in fact abnormal or inspired, why then has it been linked to mental illness in popular thought? This could simply be a logical mistake, generalizing from a few memorable cases like Van Gogh or Virginia Woolf, and ignoring the many less-memorable instances of creative geniuses who don't show signs of mental disturbance. Researchers have formally tested the relationship by administering diagnostic interviews to eminent creators, to determine whether it is reliable or just a statistical accident. An early study by Dr. Nancy Andreasen looked for symptoms of mental illness among aspiring authors at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. Andreasen is a schizophrenia researcher, and consistent with the "divergent thinking" idea she expected to find symptoms of schizophrenia among the creative students in her study. What she actually found was a higher than normal rate of bipolar disorder, also known by the older name manic-depression. The relationship was even more pronounced when she looked at the history of mental illness among the first-degree relatives of the writers, rather than among the writers themselves. Schildkraut, et. al. (1994) demonstrated a higher-than-normal prevalence of mood disorders among Abstract Expressionist artists of the New York School, as well as high rates of suicide, alcoholism, troubled marriages, and early deaths. Richards et al. (1992) had similar findings, showing a connection between mood disorders and creativity even among people who were not eminent artists. Bipolar disorder expert Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison reviewed these and other studies, and argued that the creativity link was not to mental illness in general, but to bipolar disorder in particular. (I particularly recommend the Jamison article, which includes a mental health family tree of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as well as a timeline mapping Robert Schumann's compositions to his bouts of mental illness). Jamison again notes the finding about first-degree relatives, writing that "Most manic-depressives do not possess extraordinary imagination, and most accomplished artists do not suffer from recurring mood swings” (p. 64). Jamison believes that the actual symptoms of mania are generally too disruptive to a creator's life when they rise to the level of a diagnosable disorder, but that subclinical levels or hypomania are in fact conducive to creativity.
My 1997 Master's thesis, conducted at Temple University, investigated 5 different causal pathways that might explain the linkage between bipolar symptoms and creativity:
1. H → C Level of mental health directly affects creativity.
2. H → T → C Level of mental health indirectly affects creativity, through the action of some third variable (e.g., lessened concern for societal conventions).
3. C → H Level of creativity directly affects mental health.
4. C → T → H Level of creativity indirectly affects mental health, through the action of some third variable (e.g., a self-fulfilling prophecy of differentness).
5. T → (C, H) Some third variable (e.g., life stressors) directly affects both creativity and mental health, and the two are only apparently related.
To test these various possibilities, I recruited 175 students who were enrolled in one of 3 different courses of study: psychology, business, or creative arts. The creative arts students were found at a well-regarded college of visual arts and architecture, Temple University's Tyler School in Philadelphia. I then compared the three groups of students on manic/hypomanic symptoms, as well as on other scales measuring other forms of psychopathology, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, need for social approval, and various descriptors of creative individuals. As expected, the Tyler School art students were rated higher on all measures of creativity. However, they did not score significantly higher on the hypomania scale. In fact, the business students in my study, who were graduate students pursuing an MBA, scored higher on the hypomania measure than the aspiring artists or psychologists. None of the other measures of psychopathology were different. In my study, then, the link between genius and madness was not readily apparent. Instead, there seemed to be a link between hypomania and success, because students in the business program had achieved a higher level of education, had higher GPAs, and also reported higher symptom levels on the hypomania scale.
Art students in my study were different from business or psychology students in some important other ways. They were more intrinsically motivated (invested in the work itself) and less extrinsically motivated (interested in money, recognition, or other rewards) than either of the other groups. And they were also less concerned with what other people might think of them (lower need for social approval).
My conclusion from this study was that mood was less important in creativity than other factors like intrinsic motivation and lack of need for social approval. This is consistent with findings from Rothenberg ,who conducted over 2,000 hours of personal interviews with scientists and artists internationally recognized as being at the top of their fields. His participants included playwright Arthur Miller, Nobel Laureate physicist Edwin McMillan, and novelists John Updike and John Cheever. Rothenberg’s conclusion was that “only one characteristic of personality and orientation to life and work is absolutely, across the board, present in all creative people: motivation."
My best guess, then, about the relationship between genius and madness is that there is no relationship. Despite all the hype, systematic investigations have failed to find consistently higher rates of most mental health conditions among creative artists. To the extent that one particular type of mental illness, bipolar disorder, predicts creativity, it probably does so by increasing some third variable like intrinsic motivation or lack of social concern (i.e., hypothesis #4 above). Unromantic as this conclusion may be, it appears that great creative works are like other great human endeavors, in areas as diverse as science and law: They emerge from deliberate practice, motivation, and the synchronized activities of the Intuitive and Narrative minds.
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