The ‘mad genius’ — fact or fancy?
Psychologist seeks to debunk popular notion
Their madness is legend, and Vincent van Gogh is their poster boy.
He cut off his ear with a razor blade in a fit of insanity. A tortured Dutch artist, the swirls of colour on his canvas were as untamed as his mind. The man’s alleged madness fuelled his genius and that of many others. Or so they say. “They” are the “mythers.” It’s what jazz musician and retired psychologist Judith Schlesinger calls the experts who support and seek to prove the mad-genius theory. She considers their logic: “If you’re a creative person, by definition you colour outside the lines. And if you’re a mad person, by definition you colour outside the lines. All you have to do is link the two together. You don’t even have to get too scientific about it.”
But they do. Study after study has backed the idea for decades, declaring with finality that creativity and mental illness are linked. The most recent of these studies released earlier this month comes from the United Kingdom, where scientists found comedians were more likely to have psychotic personality traits than people with non-creative jobs.
But legend may be overshadowing truth. For a contrary few — like Schlesinger — in the medical and academic communities, the theory of the “mad genius” doesn’t hold up.
“It’s crap and it embarrasses me, because it has no science,” says Schlesinger, who wrote the book on it titled The Insanity Hoax.
Chief among Schlesinger’s mythers is one she calls the “unassailable queen,” U.S. psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, whose oft-cited 1989 work — Mood disorders and patterns of creativity in British writers and artists — says 50 per cent of poets had mental health problems.
Schlesinger was unconvinced. “Her campaign has been so single-minded and so successful over the years that most people don’t even question the connection that she’s made.”
Despite the popularity of Jamison’s poet claim, the work is almost impossible to find, Schlesinger says.
But Schlesinger did. And what she discovered was the famous study was based on a sample of only 18 poets. This means the oftcited 50 per cent comprises just nine people. The margin of error on such a small sample is vast.
Among other famed proponents of the mad genius theory is Arnold Ludwig, author of The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy.
“They assume it means that within the covers of that book it has been proven that in order to be a very creative person you have to pay for it with some kind of suffering,” Schlesinger says. “But they don’t read the book.”
Inside, Ludwig dissects more than 1,000 New York Times biographies of eminent people of professions as unlinked as aviator (Amelia Earhart), magician (Harry Houdini) and singer (Marvin Gaye). Ludwig even concedes he could not find a link between eminence and mental illness.
Schlesinger has slowly garnered support since publishing her myth-busting book in 2012.
The problem isn’t with the question, says Schlesinger. “It devalues every creative person by saying that you could not have produced that wonderful art or that wonderful music unless you were mentally ill.”
Susan Holm, a psychologist in Winnipeg, also cautions anyone who might buy in to the longstanding theory. “If people do have these really severe disorders, it can actually disrupt their cognition. They have difficulty with abstract tasks. That all goes against the idea that they’re more creative.”
But the romance of the mad genius theory persists, despite new research supporting Schlesinger’s debunking. Among them a 2012 Swedish study that found, based on 40 years of research, people in creative professions were not more likely to suffer from mental illness.
“It’s complicated, but people don’t like complicated,” Schlesinger says. “They want the snappy answer, so the mythers give them the snappy answer.”