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Can mental illness make you creative?
By Andrew Onariase
22 Apr 2010
Aristotle, a Greek philosopher once wrote – “No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness”.
Mental illnesses have been around for thousands of years. Evolutionary theory suggests that in order for them to be still here, there must be some kind of survival advantage to them. If they were wholly bad, it's argued, natural selection would have eliminated them long ago. In some cases the advantage is clear. Anxiety can be a mental illness with dreadful symptoms, but it is also a trait that at a non-clinical level has survival advantages. In healthy proportions, it keeps us alert when threats are sensed.
Today it is routine for creative geniuses from history to get retrospective diagnoses of mental illness. Schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis were the most common; with Einstein, Salvador Dali, Tony Hancock, and Isaac Newton among the most famous subjects.
Few argue that full-blown psychosis is conducive to creative accomplishment, but maybe a little bit helps. Psychiatrists view mental health as a spectrum, with serious illness at one end and "being normal" at the other. Perhaps those in the middle have superior creative tendencies.
Some evidence comes from considering the relative dominance of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. There is much doubtful psychology written about "right-brain people" and "left-brain people", but it is accepted that the left side is mainly involved in language and logical analysis, while the right side is more involved in creative thought. Various techniques for studying dominance do seem to show that people with schizophrenia have more right-brain activity.
A protein called Neureglin1 is involved in brain development in the womb, a mutation in the gene that codes for this protein is linked to a higher risk of Schizophrenia. Hungarian Scientists found that people with two copies of the mutation of the genes coding for Neureglin1 scored higher on a creative test than people with only one copy, who in turn scored higher than people with no copies. According to the Hungarian researchers, this mutation might dampen activity in the brain's prefrontal cortex, easing its usual brake on mood and emotions. This mutation might make some people more creative than others, and unleash psychotic delusions in others.
Can mental illness make you creative?
This is an interesting topic-I suufer myself from schizophrenia,not that I think that on balance it has helped me be creative.Reading Surviving schizophrenia by the American psychiatrist E.Fuller Torrey gives examples of creative or famous people who have been sufferers of this cruel condition.
One of my favourite examples is James Joyce,who wrote amongst other great lines,"God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear".There is a tape I obtained from the James Joyce centre in Dublin-The Artist and Insanity,a lecture by Professor Anthony Clare.Joyce really was a creative writer.
Your Voice,the magazine of Rethink,formerly the National Schizophrenia Fellowship,did an issue in the spring of this year 2010,on the link,if indeed there is a link,between mental illness and creativity.There was a van Gogh style picture on the front cover,and in the next issue I had a letter mentioning James Joyce and how Sahaja Yoga,a form of religious meditation,had really helped me,and indeed it has helped many people achieve more balance and creativity.As someone said of Joyce's Ulysses,it should be a weapon of mass instruction,indeed in an ideal world everyone would know of Sahaja Yoga and be familiar with the works of writers and artists like Joyce and van Gogh.