Mental illness refers to a wide range of disorders that affect mood, thinking, and behavior. Many illnesses can be connected to creativity including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and ADHD. Many people with disorders use art as a productive outlet, and scientists believe that these mental disarrays can actually link to creative motives. Though there are cases that support the idea that mental illness can aid in creativity, it also is agreed that mental illness doesn’t have to be present for creativity to exist. So does that mean that there are links between mental illnesses and creative ability?
For many years, the creative arts have been used in therapy for those with or recovering from mental illnesses. Art has been used to allow the patients to express their feelings in a nonviolent way. This allowed them to recover from any addictions or the haunting inside their minds. This also led them into more creative careers after being released from therapy. In a forty-year study of over a million people, Swedish researchers reported a number of correlations between artistic occupations and mental illnesses, though most weren’t more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders. So having a mental illness did not increase the chance of entering an artistic career path, though writers have a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders. Even dancers and photographers were more likely to be bipolar. However, as a group, those in the creative professions were more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anorexia nervosa and, to some extent, autism.
There have been many artists and authors over time that were diagnosed with multiple mental illnesses. More known ones were Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Leo Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf. They were able to think outside of the box and have flights of ideas during their time. Van Gogh wrote letters to his brother Theo about combating his episodes of depression and anxiety. Plath kept journals that revealed a tormented woman who struggled to understand the meaning of life, leaving her to end her own life. Tolstoy wrote in a diary about him sinking into a deep state of depression. Woolf left a suicide note for her husband as she drowned in the River Ouse. Though it is not only authors or painters that have these problems; many actors, dancers, and singers also have mental disorders. Robin Williams was a comedian and actor that took his own life in 2014 perhaps due to him suffering from depression and Lewy body dementia, which caused him to have hallucinations, slower movements, and tremors. Chester Bennington, the lead singer of Linkin Park, wrote in many of his songs about his depression and his fight against it. His fight ended in the summer of 2017 when he committed suicide. His death caught the attention of the people and swiveled their heads to the matter of mental illnesses as the media shined its lights upon the ongoing issue.
In point of fact, research does show that many famous artists had mental and emotional instability. However, this doesn’t mean that having a mental illness was a factor in their uprising. A common claim is that happiness and productivity are factors of both creative work and bipolar illness. With the illness, however, these features are forced, free of judgment, and distorted, whereas creative artists’ productivity should be purposeful. Suffering is a key component of mental illness, but despite traditional ideas about creative people, such disruption rarely contributes to inspiration. The solution to the dilemma of mental illness in creative individuals lies in the nature of the artistic processes themselves.
Although many studies argue against each other on the matter, most can agree that mental issues do affect someone’s thoughts and even their ability to create. It is also not necessary to have a mental health problem to be artistic. Though Aristotle had once said, “No great genius has ever existed without a strain of madness.” There are also many occupations dealing with the creative part of the brain, but that does not necessarily mean that having a mental illness is needed to succeed in those career paths.