Chattahbox.com had an interesting essay about the link
between creativity and mental illness. Here’s an excerpt:
“Would scientific geniuses like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein have made their extraordinary discoveries and contributions to mankind, if they both didn’t suffer from mild insanity? Many researchers believe that madness contributes to creativity.
The article quotes Professor Gordon Claridge, of Oxford University :‘To be mildly manic depressive or mildly schizophrenic brings a flexibility of thought, an openness, and risk-taking behavior, which does have some adaptive value in creativity.’”
A fuller article is featured in The Independent. It references artist Salvador Dali as a good example: “Salvador Dali was not just a great artist. He also met the criteria for several psychosis diagnoses, a mixture of schizophrenic and depressive. He may also have been paranoid, as well having antisocial, histrionic, and narcissistic disorders. "Dalí and his contribution to the history of art highlights that abnormality is not necessarily disagreeable – or to be so readily dismissed as a sign of neurological disease. For without his instability, Dalí may not have created the great art that he did," says Caroline Murphy of Oxford.”
Obviously
serious mental illness requires treatment but I’m worried that there is a trend
to classify every eccentricity as a medical condition and try to drug it out of
existence. What will that mean in terms of creativity in the future? And will
societies that resist this trend forge ahead in innovation?
