It’s a Mad / Creative World

As far back as the Greeks, people have suspected that there is a link between creativity and madness, and now there is some statistical evidence to support that view. Writing in the current issue of Psychology Today, Constance Holden reports on findings that show that writers in particular are significantly more likely to experience and be treated for mood disorders than are others in the general population.

A study of 30 top-flight American writers over 15 years by Nancy C. Andreasen, a psychiatrist at the University of Iowa, found that 80% were treated for mood disorders (compared with 30% of a control group), 43% experienced manic depression (compared with 10% of the others), 30% suffered alcoholism (compared with 7% of the others), and two of the writers committed suicide.

Trying to understand this apparent connection between creativity and madness may not be all that difficult. It may be, as psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has long argued, that madness is nothing more or less than the name that we give to people who are different from the rest of us. Madness, in this view, is the ultimate freedom, as R. D. Laing and Michel Foucault have asserted in the last 20 years. Earlier in this century, Thomas Mann thought about the link between creativity and madness, and so did Freud as well as many others.

People who are only slightly different we judge to be creative. In fact, that’s what creativity means: the ability to put things together in a way that’s different from the way everyone else puts them together. As long as the differences are not too far out, the rest of us have points of contact with them and are able to respond to them.

But if the differences are very different, we judge them to be crazy. What is truth, after all? We agree to accept as true what everyone else agrees to accept as true. If someone’s conceptions of truth are mildly different from our own, we judge that person to be creative. But if someone’s conceptions are wildly different from everyone else’s, we judge that person to be mad.

So the long-noticed connection between creativity and madness should not be so surprising. They are two points along the continuum of being different from the norm. But where creativity is useful, madness is not.