“Great wits are sure to madness near allied / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”
– 18th-century English poet John Dryden
That couplet pretty much sums up the research of Nancy C. Andreasen, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who studies creativity. She wrote this fascinating article “Secrets of the Creative Brain” in a recent issue of The Atlantic.
That’s right: Creative genius and insanity go hand in hand. In Andreasen’s research, she has interviewed such luminaries as novelist Kurt Vonnegut, filmmaker George Lucas, and playwright Neil Simon. While those subjects are not bipolar, many included in her studies are.
Andreasen has concluded that writers and artists are cut from a different mental cloth. “The creative subjects and their relatives have a higher rate of mental illness than the control [subjects] and their relatives do,” she writes. “The most common diagnoses include bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety or panic disorder and alcoholism.”
Famous, artistic bipolar addicts are riddled throughout history – Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent Van Gogh, and Virginia Woolf, to name a few. The Atlantic article is a long read but rather worth your time.
Also in The News:
Rare genetic disease protects against bipolar disorder
From the Huffington Post – Go Ahead, Label Me
Identifying the Causes of Treatment Failures in Psychiatric Illness
