The tortured artist, isolated, overwhelmed by inspiration, churning out masterpieces and surviving on Cheerios and cigarettes, is a well-known stereotype.
David Goldbloom, speaking on Oct. 29 at the sixth annual Saul Green Memorial Lecture at the University of King’s College, deconstructs this romantic image and delves into the relationship between creativity and mental illness.
Creativity is a nebulous concept to pin down.
“Like pornography, we all know it when we see it but it’s very hard to define,” says Goldbloom, who is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, as well as a senior medical advisor at Toronto’s Center for Addiction and Mental Health.
In practical terms, Goldbloom splits creativity into three components. The first is originality, the second is the creation of a product and the third is that product’s use, whether functional or awe-inspiring. Intelligence, imagination, drive, incentive, and occasional solitude are also thought to be necessary. To measure creativity a common strategy is to look at people’s professions, though this method has its limits, says Goldbloom.
Having defined creativity, it’s possible to examine its link to mental illness. Goldbloom cites several studies published in the 1980s, including one by Nancy Andreasen, which found that 80 per cent of writers had mood disorders, compared to only 30 per cent of non-writers. Another study of poets, playwrights and artists by Kay Jamison found similarly high rates of mood disorders, such as bipolar and depression.
Judith Schlesinger, in her 2009 article “Creative Mythconceptions,” criticizes these studies. She mentions that Andreasen spoke to only 30 people over the course of 15 years, of which 27 were men. Goldbloom himself remarks that Jamison spoke to only 47 people and had no control group to compare her findings with.
Goldbloom also cites a study carried out in Sweden in 2012, which examined over 300,000 people with a variety of mental illnesses, as well as their relatives. With the exception of bipolar disorder, the study found that people with a mental illness weren’t more prone to creativity than the control group.
However, the parents and siblings of people with schizophrenia were more likely to be engaged in creative work. Goldbloom speculates that this could be because relatives are influenced by the experiences of schizophrenia without being debilitated by the illness itself.
Similarities or differences aside, not all creative people have a mental illness and not everyone with a mental illness is especially creative.
The link between creativity and mental illness is not definitive, and Goldbloom cautions that people must challenge the “romantic belief of the mad artist in his apartment, starving, not sleeping, and churning out great reams of poetry, wonderful symphonies… Illness is a burden, not a facilitator in the creative process.”
If creativity includes producing work, as Goldbloom believes, being immobilized by mental illness isn’t an advantage.
Mental illnesses, such as depression, often disrupt attention span, motivation, concentration, memory, energy and sense of pleasure.
Says Goldbloom, “all of those cognitive skills are necessary for creative work.”
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