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Creativity and Mental Illness |
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“All the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.” This quote from Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: The Guermantes Way really shows the respect we have for artists and the stereotypes we feel towards them. Art can be an unconscious expression of our most sincere thoughts and feelings in other words it is a direct pathway to the soul. Art is a subject that most feel that they don’t understand or they can’t fully appreciate because they don’t grasp the artist’s meaning behind the work. The artist is therefore someone who seen as hard to understand as well. Creative people have a unique way of viewing the world and showing this view of life to the world. In the media artists are often portrayed as outsiders who are only concerned with their work. Artists have an image in our culture that included such personality traits as being a loner, dramatic, self-absorbed, selfish, and as having substance abuse problems. These qualities are the reasons for many of the negative stereotypes surrounding artists. In some cases the mad artist or stories of crazy behavior they might be true in some ways. People with mental illnesses seem to be drawn to creative outlets for the therapeutic benefits to their illness. In the article Manic-Depression and Creativity by Kay Redfied Jamison she states that “for years, scientists have documented some kind of connection between mania, depression and creative output.” Many of the traits that are associated with a creative person are symptoms of a mental illness such as manic depression. These symptoms include are even thought of as being an advantage in creating works. The advantage is that in the manic phase the artist will have a “heightened thought”. The hypomania phase includes as Jamison points out in her article about the common features of such a phase “sharpened and unusually creative thinking and increased productivity.” The general symptoms of the manic phase include being energetic, euphoric, racing thought, need for little sleep, talking quickly, little need for food, taking pleasure to extreme, distractibility, irritability, over inflated self confidence, and impaired judgment. These qualities can be helpful to allow the artist to be in an altered and powerful state of mind and to be able to state of mind to create. Artists have been known to use alcohol and drugs to get to a forced altered state of mind much like the manic phase. As Jamison states in her article “By virtue of their prevalence alone, it is clear that mood disorders do not necessarily breed genius. Indeed, 1 percent of the general population suffers from manic-depression, also called bipolar disorder, and 5 percent from a major depression, or unipolar disorder, during their lifetime. It is true that among creative people those percentages are higher. This could be for several different reasons. One is that when people The background for this page is Jackson Pollock's painting Number 1, 1950. |
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