the myth of the tortured artist is strong the depressive poet the irascible painter the manic substance-abusing writer hannah gatsby brings this up in her Netflix special Nanette and that's right I'm not done talking about it yet it's super rare that art history gets mentioned in the wider world and I have to maximize this opportunity but anyway this is what she says about Vincent van Gogh wasn't born ahead of his time he couldn't network because he was mental he was crazy he had unstable energy people would cross the street to avoid him that's why he didn't sell any more than one painting in his lifetime he couldn't network this whole idea this romanticizing of mental illness is ridiculous it is not a ticket to genius to ticket to no way did I raise my fist in triumph when I heard this yes yes I did romanticizing mental illness and the lives of artists is an absurdly popular trope in movies books social media and in art itself not only is it not reflective of the lives of most people who do creative work for a living it can be destructive and dangerous but since Nanette I've been trying to better understand whether there really is a link between creativity and mental illness every few years a new study comes out that looks at this from a different angle the Karolinska Institutet found when looking at Swedish population registries involving over 1.2 million individuals that people in creative professions were in general not more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders compared to the population at large however people in creative professions were shown to be very slightly more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder if you're swedish but anyway if we assume the Swedes are no different than the rest of us this finding could resonate with some retrospective diagnoses that have been made about creatives of the past like some have noted that in Edgar Allan Poe's letters and in his actual writing he describes symptoms typical of bipolar disorders like extreme shifts and mood energy and activity levels he wrote in a letter I am excessively slothful and one industrious by fits i thus rambled away whole months and awake at last to a sort of mania for composition then I scribble all day and read all night so long as the disease indoors now there are different types of bipolar disorder but all of them share these kinds of up periods known as manic episodes and down one's called depressive episodes Poe Aven refers to it as a mania but it's that back and forth wave between extreme productivity and then crushing depression that we tend to see depicted in movies and contributes to the tortured reputation of artists we have no idea how an actual professional using today's criteria might diagnose Edgar Allan Poe if he time travelled to be evaluated in person in the present but people love to puzzle over this question regardless perhaps to better understand the person whose work they like who died at age 40 under mysterious circumstances or perhaps to try to solve a question that can never be solved why a person was able to make the amazing things that they made clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison has written and spoken extensively and eloquently about what she found to be a disproportionate rate of mood disorder or psychopathy among highly creative people namely renowned writers artists and composers and she has also explored how the temperament or cognitive styles associated with some mental illnesses can enhance our boost creativity like during a manic episode someone might experience the extreme focus restlessness and little need for sleep that could be seen as a temporary advantage when working on something Redfield Jamison says the manic-depressive temperament what we used to call bipolar is in a biological sense an alert sensitive system that reacts strongly and swiftly it responds to the world with a wide range of emotional perceptual intellectual behavioral and energy changes which can be good things but this manic state while it may be experienced as pure creativity can in practice yield work that is partially or even entirely incoherent and more critically it can be followed by episodes of extreme and life-threatening depression Redfield Jamison made this chart of the productivity of composer Robert Schumann for a Scientific American article in 1995 showing a relationship between his mental health states and how many compositions he made in a given year you see the most compositions were made when he was manic and the least when depressed and of course none at all after he attempted suicide and later died it's important to note that Redfield Jamison studies and the ones she is based her findings on have been criticized for an over reliance on anecdotal accounts small sample sizes and inconsistent methodologies but even if we consider a more recent study from 2017 that found a slight correlation between schizophrenia and creativity from the International Center for studies and creativity at Buffalo State they conclude that while mild schizophrenia symptoms might support creativity full-blown symptoms hurt or undermine it as Redfield Jamison put it no one is creative when severely depressed psychotic or dead opening the door to say that some aspects of mental illness can be beneficial or desirable in some way is tricky it can definitely send us down the path of romanticizing illness but it might possibly help in finding new approaches to treatment ones that admit or try to mitigate the loss of aspects of diseases that can be positive but this is different for everybody musician Jeff Tweedy looks at the relationship between his productivity and mental health quite differently I look at it like the part of me that is able to create managed to create in spite of the problems I was having and spa and you know almost as as if that was the only healthy part of me and that's the part of me that I feel like getting healthier has I've been able to nurture the more research you read the more you find that the evidence suggesting that mental illness conducive to creativity is incredibly slight the exception that the Karolinska Institutet study did find when looking into the prevalence of mental illness in certain professions was authors who were found to have an increased likelihood of bipolar disorder as well as schizophrenia unipolar depression anxiety disorders substance abuse and suicide make about what you will but remember that correlation does not equal causation mental illness does not make you a good writer it's also worth noting that other professions have been found to have higher than average rates of mental illness a famous 1990 study found that lawyers had a higher rate of major depressive disorders when compared with employed persons generally and a 2012 CDC analysis of data from 17 states found that the occupation group with the highest suicide rate was farm workers fishermen and forestry for me these studies only raised more questions like the Karolinska Institutet defined creative professions as artistic and scientific which i thought was really cool because of course creativity is involved in science although scientists do also get the rep for being mad but then i tried to think about what professions are definitively not creative like can't you be a really creative accountant awake in the night with a brilliant new idea for how to best account things you can be a creative engineer teacher youtuber building contractor barista statistician mortician truck driver mechanic flight attendant - forward exit doors - overweight with noises and two rear exit doors Suns overhead and lots on the fleur-de-lis - all exits seriously what are the jobs that don't or can't involve creativity data entry assembly line work but then there's the reality that what you do for a living and fill out on forms doesn't necessarily reflect how creative you are during your breaks or in your spare time or just inside your head and then of course you're not always doing the job you're best at or that suits your talents the more I try to pin down what creativity is and whom can be said to have it the more indeterminate it becomes there are studies about what creativity is but I can tell you decisively that reading them may have the harmful effect of draining all creativity from your consciousness but examples abound of prominent successful artists who do not appear to suffer from mental illness they might not be good candidates for a Hollywood movie whose three-act structure requires that they're pretty good then hit rock bottom and then rebound for a transcendent finish be it in recovery retirement or death it's usually death mental health is something artists negotiate just like accountants do or lawyers or anybody else but mental illness is real and serious and if you need help you can and should reach out to qualified professionals who would like nothing better than to try to assist you in getting healthier what makes you an artist or productive or successful or what makes you successful and productive and an artist all at the same time is extremely unclear and unpredictable and changing whether or not you experience mental illness you can be a person sensitive to the world around you a thinking and feeling an expressive person able to make things that are meaningful to other people what are the things in life that Kindle and support your creativity maybe by focusing on that question we can reframe the conversation about how art happens and how we can better know and celebrate this strange and mysterious and sublime part of personhood