Tuesday, October 16, 2012

I _can_ blame headline writers for this

The BBC made as the off-page headline for this story about creativity and mental illness this monstrosity: "Creativity 'a mental illness'". The actual story headline was "Creativity 'closely entwined with mental illness'"

Anyhow... after saying that writers were at risk for anxiety and bipolar and depression and substance abuse (and photographers and dancers to be bipolar), they report Swedish researchers as concluding

As a group, those in the creative professions were no more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders than other people.

But they were more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism, the Journal of Psychiatric Research reports.

And the article includes the usual celebration:

Similarly, the disordered thoughts associated with schizophrenia might spark the all-important originality element of a masterpiece.

Only if the writer has the discipline to whip it back into order. Otherwise you don't get originality but randomness. I can't recall who pointed out that thousands of poets used laudanum or the like, but only one wrote Kubla Khan.

Beth Murphy (at Mind) pleads for a little sense of proportion:

It is important that we do not romanticise people with mental health problems, who are too often portrayed as struggling creative geniuses.

Too late for this article...

1 comment:

Texan99 said...

But that is an interesting idea, that creative people share some kind of heritage with the mentally ill, which expresses itself differently in the two groups. A dullard makes too few connections among ideas, a schizophrenic too many, and too indiscriminately. The trick is to make many without losing any sense of which ones are important or valuable. Why does the ability to discriminate break down in some people?