Popular culture has this idea that being a creative person means that you must suffer for your art. Or you must be ill (mentally or physically) in order to be an artist. The best example I can think of is Vincent Van Gogh, where it has been documented that he was unwell in a lot of ways (he also had two STIs and ate paint… so there is that too). The big question of the day and I think others have asked this: “do you have to be mentally or physically ill to harness creativity”? Well, obviously not. If that were the case, then there would more than likely be a tremendous amount of people either living with chronic conditions or more creative people (depending on the statistics of how many people are creative and how many people have a chronic condition. And there are multiple ways to be creative, I am just talking about artists). However, after watching the video that I linked above, I got to thinking, how many people do I know that are creative thinkers and have mental health conditions. And surprisingly, almost everyone I know who is creative in some way does. So, is there something to this?
According to Professor Albert Rothenberg of Harvard Medical School (that’s right, I read an article by Psychology Today ), one of the reasons for this misconception that creativity and mental illness are linked together, is that both are diverging from the norm. However, he does site quite a number of highly creative people, such as Jane Austen and Henry Moore who didn't have any documented mental illness. One notable artist that he does reference is Jackson Pollock. Pollock was diagnosed as having a bipolar condition and was a well documented alcoholic, however it wasn’t until he was in therapy and stopped drinking that he developed what we now refer to as Abstract Expressionism . Through Rothenberg’s research, he notes that people who are creative, can’t really be productive unless their symptoms and anxiety are lowered since productivity and creativity are difficult to accomplish when one is ill. This makes sense to me since I can’t do anything when I am not feeling great.
I guess the big take away is yes, there are commonalities that are noted between mental health conditions are being a highly creative person. You don’t have to suffer to be an artist, but if you are an artist or a creative person and are suffering, take the time to heal. Don’t think that you must push through the illness to create something great. Because, that something great will come once you work through whatever you are going through in that moment (please check out the article I linked above, there is a lot of science language in it that I had a hard time understanding. However, it was still interesting). Thanks for reading and I hope you learned a little today, I really did. Until next week folks!
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