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Is there a correlation between being creative and being mentally ill? There have been many studies that suggest that there is indeed such a connection. Although these studies have proven the connection, no one has yet proven if creativity causes mental illness or if it simply is a matter of more mentally ill people being creative.
In her article, “The Sylvia Plath Effect,” Deborah Smith Bailey writes, “Some studies have backed up this notion, (that there is a link between creativity and mental illness) suggesting that writers, artists, and others are more likely to have a mental illness and that people with certain mental illnesses, such as depression and mood disorders, appear somewhat more likely to be creative. While some researchers have found that creative people are slightly more at-risk, others have found more grave connections, such as that they are 30 percent more likely to have bipolar disorder.”
In her book, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, a retrospective study of the personal letters, journal entries, and the works of English poets and writers, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison came to the same conclusion.
What does this mean for us today? In my personal life, I find that writing is therapeutic and helps to stabilize my moods. It may be the time spent writing and thus filling up my day with productive activity and being somewhat on a schedule makes the difference in my life. Or is having a creative outlet such as writing the balm upon my spirit? In her book, Dr. Jamison sites Lord Alfred Tennyson, great poet of the past, who focused on the opiate-like relief brought about by the writing of verse itself:
But, for the unquiet heart and brain/A use in measured language lies/Like dull narcotics, numbing pain/In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold/But that large grief which these enfold/Is given in outline and no more.
I find that as I sit at my computer and type, I have both a physical quieting of my thoughts as I am hypnotized by the tapping sound of the computer keyboard and a mental one as my mind stays focused on the words themselves. There is calm and a peace that hovers over me as I create whenever I write. I have a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction that can then be equated with feeling good about myself, which tends to stabilize my moods. I, for one, find my writing as powerful and important for my mental health stability as my medications.
Since I started writing, my whole attitude about life has changed and become more positive. As I started a long project of writing a book and found myself sticking with it, I started believing in myself. This translated itself into my being able to cut the number of my medications down as well as the dosage of two of them. As my mind became less encumbered by the tranquilizing effect of my medications, my mind became more active and creative, and yet, I did not have a psychotic episode. Unlike times in the past when I questioned my feeling good as a precursor to a mania, I feel secure that I am simply on the normal scale of having a positive outlook on life. I no longer fear becoming sick because I am “up” and “running” at full tilt. The mere fact that I have had the stick-to-it-ness to stay with this major project proves to me that I am anything but manic (scattered). I believe that my writing calms my bipolar illness and in turn my bipolar illness enhances my ability to write.
Let me close with more words from Dr. Jamison: “The great imaginative artists have always sailed ‘in the wind’s eye,’ and brought back with them words or sounds or images to counterbalance human woes. That they themselves were subject to more than their fair share of these woes deserves our appreciation, understanding, and very careful thought.”