Creativity and Mental Illness

Confused beliefs and purported findings have primarily arisen because both creativity and mental illness involve deviations, sometimes fairly extreme ones, from normative modes of thought. But there are sharp differences in effects: mental illness symptoms—compulsions, obsessions, delusions, panic attacks, depression, and personality disorders—deviate in stereotyped and frequently banal ways, whereas creativity involves novel and rich results. A common claim is that extreme euphoria and productivity are features of both creative work and bipolar illness. With the illness, however, these features are involuntary, devoid of judgment, and distorted, whereas creative artists’ productivity is purposeful, and euphoria results almost always from exceptional accomplishment. Suffering is an intrinsic component of mental illness but, despite the traditional romantic belief, such disruption seldom contributes to creative inspiration. Suffering for creative people generally comes from an unwelcome lack of recognition and its consequences, neither direct cause nor effect of mental illness. Detailed examples are presented here of the work in progress of artists with diagnosed bipolar disorder, Jackson Pollock and Edvard Munch. These illustrate the use of healthy and adaptive creative cognition—janusian and homospatial processes—in the former’s breakthrough conception during an improvement phase in his treatment leading to the development of the Abstract Expressionist Movement and in the latter’s stepwise transformation of an hallucination into his famous artwork “The Scream.”