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Mental illness has been associated with creative inspiration since antiquity when those in altered mental and emotional states were perceived to possess special insight, such as the art of prophecy, which was thought to mean that they were in contact with the gods. Psychosis, hallucinations, visions, neurosis, melancholy, mania, anxiety, paranoia, delusions, hypo-mania, depression, schizophrenia, and the moods brought on by substance abuse constitute these altered mental and emotional states.
Dr. Kaye Redfield Jamison chronicles in her remarkable book, Touched With Fire, the lives of artists, writers, and composers afflicted with mental illness. Dr. Jamison therein examines the psychology of the mentally ill artist. She reveals that mentally ill artists actually do think differently than healthy people, and this helps to account for why they are often so creative.
Mentally ill artists, Dr. Jamison explains, have heightened sensory awareness, expansiveness, emotional intensity, rapid mental associations, fluidity of thought, fluency of language and imagery, fewer inhibitions, moments of lucidity, high energy, enthusiasm, and periods of great productivity. They have the capacity to regress and access the unconscious while remaining in contact with reality on the surface of things, and the capacity to tolerate extreme states of emotion. Their unique mindset enables diversity and flexibility of thought, rapid quantities of thoughts translating into new qualities of associations, adaptive flexibility, spontaneous flexibility, ideation fluency, expression fluency, associational fluency, and diffuseness. Their ability to combine ideas blurring and shifting conceptional boundaries, their extravagant and elaborate cognitive operations, and their elated mood which heightens creative problem solving facilitate their artistic work.
Dr. Jamison highlights in her book famous mentally ill artists, writers, and composers, identifying those who underwent hospitalization, and noting those who committed suicide. Perhaps the most widely known mentally ill artist to have committed suicide was Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh. Hospitalized in an asylum in Arles, France, after notoriously cutting off his ear and giving to a woman, he painted his hospital room in vivid and emotional yellows and greens.
Some of the other renowned artists suffering from mental illness include: English poet William Blake, American poet Emily Dickinson, British poet T.S. Eliot, French novelist Victor Hugo, Russian novelist Boris Pasternak, American poet Sylvia Plath, American writer Edgar Allan Poe, American writer Ernest Hemingway, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, French composer Hector Berlioz, Russian composer Peter Tchaikovsky, French painter Paul Gauguin, Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo, and American painters Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock.
Creativity has also played an important role in my life. Since the age of 17, I have been writing for publication. Consisting mostly of a large unpublished volume of lyric poetry, my writing also includes a mental health memoir, a coming-of-age novel (which is ongoing), many newspaper and journal articles, reports, and papers. Some of my short poems can be found on the poetry website: www.poetry.com.
Books have long been my passion. I am fluent in several foreign languages and have read widely. I love to create both poetry and prose. The act of creation gives great satisfaction. Performance (the performing arts), I have found (in my case operatic singing), also can impart this kind of spontaneous joy.
Many artists would say that the act of creation is a religious experience. Artists feel as though their inspiration and ideas come from somewhere beyond themselves. The process of creation can be like talking to God.
Generations of artists, composers, and writers have captured the human heart in their art, music, and writing. The Arts are essential both for our humanity and our happiness—nurturing, delighting, and comforting us. However, unfortunately, as a result of the lack of understanding and stigma with which many lay people regard the mentally ill, the extraordinary offerings that high functioning mentally ill artists have made through human history have often been ignored. What beautiful and indispensable contributions creative mentally ill artists have made to our world!