PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS "CRAZY"

The general impression of artists is that of being eccentric – ‘egocentric, temperamental, neurotic, rebellious, unreliable, licentious, extravagant, obsessed by their work and all together difficult to live with’. On the other hand, they have also been observed to be ‘contemplative, meditating, brooding, solitary, creative and alienated’. At some point, 40 years ago, psychologists determined that artists might also have been suffering from a mental illness.

The 19th century composer Robert Schumann created scores of musical masterpieces, all the while reportedly enduring bouts of manic-depression that repeatedly drove him to attempt suicide. Some researchers argue that Schumann’s mental illness – particularly his manic periods – enhanced his creative powers. But does madness really heighten creative genius in artists, musicians, and writers?

From a bountiful paper trail of letters and medical records, researchers have indeed linked Schumann’s most productive periods with his manic intervals. One dramatic example: The composer completed four works in 1839, when he was depressed, and 25 the following year, a period of mania. But Temple University psychologist Robert Weisberg, Ph.D. says that it’s not always that creative genius is rooted in mental illness.

Yet the fact remains that there is a high rate of mental disorders among artistic geniuses. In which case, Weisberg contends, perhaps artistic genius contributes to mental illness. A creative lifestyle hardly provides emotional stability, and many artists struggle against poverty, public indifference, and

– if they finally manage to create great works – the overwhelming pressure to live up to prior successes.

What’s more, creative types often romanticize mental illness. For many artists “it’s almost like a badge that makes your work more valid,” notes Weisberg. That makes them more attuned to symptoms of mental illness, and boosts the likelihood that researchers will detect it in artists.

In 1989 the psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison, who herself suffers from bipolar disorder, surveyed 47 British authors and visual artists from the British Royal Academy and found that 38 per cent had been treated for a mood disorder. In particular, half of the poets in her sample had needed medication or hospitalization. Responding to questions about the role of very intense moods in the creative process, many participants in the study reported changes in mood, cognition (thinking), and behavior either preceding or coinciding with creative episodes.

The most common such changes were ‘increases in enthusiasm, energy, self-confidence, speed of mental association, fluency of thoughts and elevated mood, and a strong sense of wellbeing’. Participants also reported a noticeably decreased need for sleep and feelings of elation, excitement, and anticipation. These features overlap closely with the clinical features of hypomania or mania.

Other experts say that “a creative person may be different from other people in that he is more open to experience, exploratory, risk tasking, and tolerant of ambiguity. Such traits make him see and feel and understand more, but these also make him hurt more easily and so more prone to experience suffering and dark moods.” A creative person experiences the order and structure that others find comforting as inhibiting and even suffocating. For this reason, he feels the need to confront norms and conventions, discard the certitudes of black-and-white definition, and escape into a richer and more nuanced ‘borderless grey’.

But while “mood, temperament, behavioral and cognitive factors associated [with most artists] can… make them more creative by increasing the fluency and originality of their thinking,” it can also be hard on the artists. Their different view and experience of the world make them look ‘crazy’.

On a larger perspective, population groups with a high proportion of creative individuals are likely to be more artistically and culturally developed, lending them a stronger sense of identity and purpose and tighter social cohesion. They are also likely to be more scientifically and technologically advanced, and so more economically and militarily successful. Thus, such population groups have better survival prospects.