On madness and creativity
It’s the cliché isn’t it. If you’re creative then you also have to be slightly mad. And if you’re brilliant, if you’re like Sylvia Plath or Virgina Woolf or David Foster Wallace, then there has to be something wrong with you.
Well, the theory might not be so far fetched after all.
Studies have shown that fiction writers are ten times more likely to be bipolar than the population in general. Poets are forty times more likely to have the disorder. Even college students who sign up for poetry-writing seminars have more bipolar traits than the average college student.
Other studies show that the relatives of creative writers also have a higher likelihood of suffering from a mental illness than the population in general.
But what is illness? Perhaps it isn’t the label and a diagnosis, perhaps it’s the inability to live the life we want, to live a life that is good for us. And, as we all know, a good life can look quite different for different people.
Writers and artists reach for something which is out of the ordinary, they look for the things that are hidden from plain sight. In order to do that they sometimes have to go beyond what is regarded as normal or comfortable, both in their inner-worlds, in their hearts and in their lives.
Without them the world would be a much poorer, sadder and less healthy place.
– Facts from The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human by Jonathan Gottschall.