hello, i have been reading a lot of things recently that link mental illness with creativity, notably manic depression and the supposed 'artistic temprament'.  does this reassure me (after a devastating episode of mental illness) that i am actually just a sensitive/ fragile 'creative type' and i'm now in the good company of creative geniuses who suffered greatly for their work? 

no!

creativity requires us to experience life intensely, but i can't accept that acute distress is something artists should just have to accept.  If it is part of the deal that being an artist means you have to suffer more than any other vocation than i'm going to walk as far away from creativity as possible
to me the apparent badge of honour of insanity in the arts adds greatly to the stigma and misunderstanding about mental illlness, i wonder what thoughts this highly creative circle have?

love c

 

I think it varies, some can create and enjoy life for others like Nieztsche there was a personal cost to it all. Schopenhauer lived well despite his pessimism

No unusual anguish to report here, Camel. Tom

Agree with your stance, Camel. I think in many cases 'artistic' projects can be an assist, therapeutic, but that is another thing. There are many myths around tormented geniuses, the starving artist in the garret, the alcoholic poet, etc. All experience, good or bad, in life can only widen perspective and understanding, but to say you must 'suffer for your art' is, in my opinion, rubbish.

Cheers

milner

thank you


myth is powerful stuff, let's take care of ourselves as we are the mythmakers!  x

Dear Camel,
I think it is important to define insanity and resist the 'diagnosis' of doctors.  I know alot of insane doctors.  
Seriously, there is so much insanity in the world, I feel like I live in upside down land.  For instance, they drug little kids because they don't sit still. (call it ADD)
I think a bunch of adults would be alot more sane if they acted more like kids and jumped up and down or spun around on the floor with their tongue sticking out and laughing.
Every day is an opportunity and challenge to find the sanity and the real.
Good luck with discovering clarity through the distortions.
Marg

Milner's sums up well. I'm definitely crazy and a lousy poet but I'm not a mad man. I suppose you can say an artist must be a kind of mad man to create. (Who can imagine scribbling on a white sheet of paper (or screen) for the better part of a day and imagining this is not a kind of madness.) You could also say a mad man must have a kind of creativity to be an accomplished mad man. Both statements have the same relative validity and represent a couple of human types. The absolute connection between artists and madness has yet to be established in either the annals of biography or the riggers of science. Besides, both these disciplines can easily produce examples of some rather all to normal, boring, hoe-hum personalities in which art flowed like  water from an artesian well. It may be more accurate to say that most artists have eccentricities and that these traits are sometimes mistaken for madness by these whose standard of normalcy is too tightly bound by the status quo.

Camel, I have a hunch that, like the artist, other professionals can experience unbearable amounts of suffering while practicing their crafts. Think of soldiers, counselors, homicide investigators, social workers, international aid workers, and even your local parole officer. They all watch as people pass before them -- some to doom, some to lives of unimaginable horror -- without being able to change the course of another's suffering. Who might survive the witness of this without some rending of the soul? I don't see artists as the greatest suffering servants of humanity. I do see artists as human witnesses who may have an obligation to relive in the creation of their art what horrors they have witnessed.

thanks for all your interesting thoughts :)   

marg, i used to have the exact same feelings as you untill i encountered the mind's fragility in a horrible way, i owe my life to my doctors and their treatment, i had no idea what was happening to me.   the brain is like any other part of the body; if you pull a muscle you can't just go on running without causing more damage..  if you had a serious kidney or liver malfunction you wouldn't hesitate to take the medication that restored you to health, alas psychiatric drugs carry such a stigma

thanks to all for reassurance that this apparent link is not so apparent at all .. you are lovely puffs of kindness truly  x

'Creativity' can someone define it? camel, your statement is too bold and shows a closed mind, one may suggest that by using both hemispheres of the brain, only then can the mind be truly open.

Some can tap in and tap out (Poe) and Christmas (Crossing the Corpus Callosum) posted here, a wonderful place to be for 'creativity' two perspectives, or more? The neural pathways are determined by interaction, experiences, memories, plus many more psychial transmissions (unconscious process) and people with 'mental illness' are 'wired' to operate in an atypical way.

Dismissal of any form of creation, by anyone, declares ignorance on the part of the declarer.


Creativity suggests open mindedness, not a closed perspective

hello mark i agree that to link 'creativity' with anything particular (eg mental illness) reduces rather than expands our notions of 'creativity', and i did not mean to do that in my post, but to comment on commentators that do! 
but yes i am sure my mind is closed in many ways, to me open mindedness is a lifelong sort of process,  thanks for your thoughts x

Had to comment here because I'm fairly crazy and try to write poetry or whatever you wish to call it.  The bad thing about being depressed is all you can think of is yourself, so my writing is quite boring when I'm I'm on a down.

We see pictures in our mind, not words.  Words get in the way and ruin our/my writing.  Now if I could just become wordless I might be able to write.

One of the reasons artists get labeled insane is that they're in the expression business, and so if insanity is what they have, it will get expressed.  But what if you're not a professional expresser?  There are insane bus drivers, roofers, and second grade teachers, but they usually seek to hide it -- and so we have then the stereotype of "such a quiet boy" who snaps and guns down his whole family at Easter dinner.  If he worked in an ice-cream store, do we then keep our kids away from ice cream?  We do not. 

dear Kriss

thank you for sharing this.

silent lotus

~

.

`

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/13/alice-cooper-erie-pa-concert_n_1144016.html


"It is fun to play a character that is mythical, [but] he is nothing like me," he said.

"He is a character that I play.

I created him to be my favorite rock star and I created him to be a pretty dangerous character.

So going from being a family guy like I am, with my wife and kids, married 35 years, go to church, play golf, I do everything that a regular guy does.

Then at night, I play this character that is just beyond reprehensible."


Vincent Damon Furnier ....   aka,  Alice Cooper  ( age 63 )


`

I don't believe writing, being creative is suffering. It's a joy. Of course writers, poets, artists, chefs, any other creative has a slightly different way of thinking, perhaps more eccentric, but hopefully not crazy.

I have benefited from what you might call the collective wisdom of others about what it means to live with BPD and other conditions. This wisdom comes from the reflections of other writers, from specialists, indeed a range of commentators.

Finding solutions to my BPD problems and telling about what works for me taps into my creative resources and it also requires investigating my own trial and error efforts to create a personally satisfying life in order to separate what works from what doesn’t work. Finding solutions and what works in one’s own life is a form of artistry that can result in highly individual and unique solutions and outcomes.

I like to think that my book, my 85,000 word account of what I call My Chaos Narrative taps into both my own wisdom and experience and the collective wisdom of others looking for a better quality of life by writing about what has been helpful for them as sufferers with BPD or some other condition or, indeed, as a loved one or family member.

Go to this link at my website on this topic for more of my views on BPD and creativity: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/Bipolar.html

I have benefited from what you might call the collective wisdom of others about what it means to live with BPD and other conditions. This wisdom comes from the reflections of other writers, from specialists, indeed a range of commentators. Finding solutions to my BPD problems and telling about what works for me taps into my creative resources and it also requires investigating my own trial and error efforts to create a personally satisfying life in order to separate what works from what doesn’t work.

Finding solutions and what works in one’s own life is a form of artistry that can result in highly individual and unique solutions and outcomes. I like to think that my 85,000 word account of BPD taps into both my own wisdom and experience and the collective wisdom of others looking for a better quality of life.  By writing about what has been helpful for me and for them as sufferers with BPD or some other condition is one of the raisons d'etre of the internet. For more go to my website at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/Bipolar.html