Creativity Linked to Mental Illness, Study Confirms

Great, there goes half the things I like to do. Labeling everyone under some type of psychiatric mumbo jumbo seems the trend as of late. Guess these individuals conducting the research should consider that they themselves are included in the results of the study by their own guidelines and findings.

I wonder where the world would be if creative people weren't allowed to think and create. I must say it would be a very bland and dull place without artists, writers, scientists, ect...

Source

Creative types are thought to be more likely to suffer from mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. A new large-scale study of the Swedish population helps confirm this link.

Last year, researchers at the Karolinska Institutet near Stockholm found that families with a history of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia were more likely to produce artists and scientists. They built on this evidence in a new study, published this month in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, which covers a larger population sample and a wider scope of psychiatric diagnoses.

(Alternative source)

It's one of the stupidest things to put funds towards, IMO. Of course highly divergent people will be creative, and have a propensity for mental illness. You simply need a healthy dose of high convergence to balance it out. If you have high convergence, and lower divergence, OCD type things can pop out. If you have high divergence without high convergence, you can get things like psychosis and schizophrenia.

Even then, tis not so black and white. Someone can be about equal in both, yet the expression or repression of one may happen due to a variety of circumstances. Genes give the base, yet the environment up regulates or down regulates depending on numerous factors.

That's why these studies suck. One will prove a link, another won't. These people aren't integrating enough factors to have a clue how to adequately set up control.

that study must have been done by some retards of the highest order.

My god, is there anything else they/we can spend money on? How am I working and broke and funds can be drummed up at will to fund "research"?

I wish I had a magic pot full of money too. Reach in, pull out cash, research if buying and driving a new Ferrari is a good idea or not.

My computer was slow loading the page from your link, and I bailed, so I confess I did not read the entire article. However, this sentence struck me...

"…families with a history of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia were more likely to produce artists and scientists.

That does not mean that the artists ARE the bipolars/schizo's-- necessarily. What I mean is, maybe the bipolars & schizo's in those families were NOT one & the same as the artists that study indicates that those families produced.

Or maybe I WANT it to mean that because of my lifetime affinity to drawing/painting/writing/creating. But for me, art is and always has been a way to 'stay sane' in this crazy, unpredictable world. Not saying I'm a poster child for sanity or anything...

well I guess this will redesign the term "theres a fine line between brilliance and insanity" I am not surprised though most of us creative types are not too down to earth and "sane".

but tell me... what is sanity?

reply to post by Daedal


they just want to medicinalize some more people. The media is always hinting at this with 'ohh look at this person with X topical mental disability. Oh but they're actually beautiful because look a painting.'
While I have no problem with the mentally challenged or neuroatypical the moral of the story seems to be to romanticise the whole thing.
Its 'they're actually just creative souls' instead of 'hey why are there so many people with psychological problems now maybe we should look at what (or who) is causing that'. On the other hand I think yes the creative are going to not be average if they keep defining normal brain function are basic and incapable of critical thinking, comprehension and creation. TPTB like us to think its normal to have brains that can only consume, process and regurgitate the sputum of a toxic media.

Jealousy of the non-creative?

I'm a creative and my career puts me in constant contact with varied creatives of many kinds.

Yes, there's "madness" here, but one man's crazy is another man's visionary.

Think like us, be like us, one of us, one of us...outcast and shun anyone different call them crazy, medicate them with a chemical lobotomy, we don't like change, we don't want change, smart creative types bring change, they could create and invent things, making our market unstable, lobotomize them protect our interests, sheep should just eat what we feed them... Hey status quotient GFY.

Its no skin off my nose, i've always introduced myself as anything but normal...who would want to be normal? Its severly boring. Of course i'm crazy i do practically the same thing everyday for 5 days a week, how does anyone stay sane? Its something i've never understood and i'm not sure i want to

Originally posted by The GUT
Jealousy of the non-creative?

:

No, while the imagination is a great strength for all of us creative types, it can also be the death of us under stressful times. It's not jealously. I can personally attest to one this first reply said as I suffer from OCD myself. Our creative abilities are great, but they can get out of your control and hurt you.

How bout we make invent another mental illness, well call it "sheepism". For all of those people that follow along, and dont create anything. Because taking away creativity and demonizing it is the most disgusting thing I have heard from society.

reply to post by R3KR

There already is one for that it is called being a sociopath.

I don't have a creative cell in my body. I am clear!

But dont' misinterprit this, doesn't mean that all people who are creative have a mental illness, but those with severe mental illness, tend to be creative.

Jim Carrey
Van Gogh
Kurt Cobaine
Ernest Hemingway
Jack London
Carrie Fisher
etc etc

When thinking about this, I so wonder if creative people are the normal ones, and everybody else suffers from mental illness.

A list of creative people who allegedly suffer from mental illness:

depressionmentalhealth.com... pics/a-few-famous-people-who-had-mental-health-problems/

Maybe they are all normal, and we are not?

A partial list from the site:

A Few Famous People Who Had Mental Health Problems : To make a thorough list would be quite exhaustive and extensive , so only a few famous people who have been significantly respected for their achievements and who had battles with various mental health disorders/illnesses are listed below: * Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia in Star Wars). Carrie Fisher had problems with drugs in the 1970s. She was finally diagnosed with Bi-Polar 2. * John Nash (Nobel Prize winner in mathematics). He battled life-long Schizophrenia; he was well recognized or documented in ‘A Beautiful Mind’. * Judy Collins (singer and song-writer); suffered Depression after her son aged 33 completed suicide in 1992. * Linda Hamilton (actress); played a role in ‘The Terminator’ and suffered Bi-Polar Disorder. * Virginia Woolf (British novelist); she experienced Bi-Polar Disorder and suffered mood-swings all of her life. * Abraham Lincoln (16th President of the United States); suffered severe Depression and was at times suicidal.

This research is a crap . No matter how much they try , we won't believe / support the result . Creative people are backbone of our future .

Seriously, they could have mailed me twenty bucks and I've had told them the same thing. Creative might be a misnomer really. I think it's more a combination of divergent perspective, which people tend to find novel - combined with a deep need to be accepted by the "normal" folks... a recipe for leading the eccentric to want to find ways to make their divergences entertaining.

~Heff

What it is, is that many forms of mental illness like bipolar or schizophrenia have damaged parts of the brain, for lack of a better word.

So the brain rewires itself in some ways, making these people very creative.

In fact, a symptoms of a rare and fatal form of dementia is preceded by a sudden obsession with the arts.

Here is a fascinating podcast on it:

Unraveling Bolero by radiolab

I personally prefer the term eccentric. Back in the old days; the "crazy" were the shamans, the prophets, the healers, and holy men and women. Phaedrus' knife is always sharp and cutting away.

I think the major difference between creative and non, one is social and the other not so much. Creatives like to learn about and manipulate the objects in their world, the non creative like to learn about and manipulate the people in their world. It's just a matter of focus that's all.