Quote:
extract from Kay Redfield Jamison, Prof of Psychiatry, John Hopkins University School of Medicine
For years, scientists have documented a connection between mania, depression and creativity. In the late ninetieth and early twentieth centuries, researchers turned to accounts of mood disorders written by prominent artists, their physicians and friends. Their work strongly suggested that renowned writers, artists and composers and their first-degree relatives were more likely to experience mood disorders and to commit suicide than was the general population.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who experienced recurrent depression and probably hypomanic spells, often expressed fears that he might inherit the ‘taint of blood’ in his family. His father, grandmother and two great-grandfathers, as well as five of his brothers, suffered from insanity, melancholia, uncontrollable rage or what today know as manic depressive illness. One brother was confined to an asylum for nearly six years, Lionel, one of Alfred’s sons, displayed a mercurial temperament, as did one of his grandsons.
People with manic depressive illness and those who are creative share certain features: the ability to function well on a few hours’ sleep, the focus to work intensively and an ability to experience depth and variety of emotions. Where depression questions, ruminates and hesitates, mania answers with vigour and certainty.
Robert Schumann’s musical works, charted by year and opus number, show a striking relation between his moods and his productivity. He composed most when hypomanic and least when depressed. Both his parents were clinically depressed, and two other relatives committed suicide. Schumann himself attempted suicide twice and died in an insane asylum. One of his sons spent more than thirty years in a mental institution.
come to think of it i know quite a lot of mentally ill people that are creative :confused: