Creativity and mental illness: Is there a link

There is a widely held assumption that those who are more creative are also more likely to have poor mental health. The greatest artists have the greatest internal battles, the best musicians have the biggest heartbreaks, and so on. However, is this true?

Psychologists have been looking into the link between creativity and mental health for years, but only recently have they produced concrete evidence of what’s really going on. In this gallery, we cover the scientific findings that look at the connection.

The stereotype

There is the common stereotype that those who are creative are more likely to have a mental illness. For years the stereotype of the depressed intellectual, or bipolar artist, or anything of the same ilk, has prevailed in our society.

Origin

A lot of this stereotype has branched out from the fact that there have been creative geniuses who also had a mental illness, such as Vincent van Gogh or Virginia Woolf.

Modern examples

There is also the 27 Club, a group of famous creatives who died at 27 including Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970), Kurt Cobain (1967-1994), and Janis Joplin (1943-1970).

Link

Most of the time, if one is truly ill as van Gogh was, then it is very hard to produce work. There seems to be the belief that their work could only be created because of their mental illness, but that can be highly questioned.

That mental health causes creativity or vice versa has very little evidence to support it apart from some famous examples. If there is any link, it is more likely to be a correlation rather than a causation. (Pictured: Percy Shelley)

Genius

The special cases of world-famous individuals are anomalies when looking at the wider link between creativity and mental health because they are geniuses, or, in other words, not your average person. (Pictured: John Keats)

Where did it start?

The stereotype started with a simple quote by Aristotle (384-322 BCE). He stated that “no great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.” However, “madness” does not necessarily mean mental illness.

Stereotype

From then on, people thought that genius brought about mental illness. It then evolved to the belief that creativity was linked to mental illness, but they are two very different things.

Creativity

To understand why we have overemphasized the link between creativity and mental illness, we must define creativity. The formal definition is the quality of being able “to produce through imaginative skill.”

The definition should be more comprehensive to encapsulate what we mean when we talk about it in reference to mental illness. Dr. Gregory J. Feist, a lead researcher in the field of creativity and psychology, suggests that there are two criteria. When you are creative, what you produce has to be both “original” and “meaningful to some group of people.”

Social idea

Creativity is actually a social label. Take van Gogh as an example. He was not thought of as creative until after his death because his paintings didn’t hold any meaning for other people during his lifetime. The public just thought he had no skill.

Mental illness

Now, we have to look at the baseline. If people think that mental health is linked to creativity, we should first know how many people have a mental illness. We will use statistics from the US as an example.

Creativity and mental illness: Is there a link

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