CREATIVITY AND PSYCHOTIC DISORDER: THE LINK
A PAPER PRESENTATION BY AKAN DAVID
ABSTRACT
This study describes what creativity and psychotic
disorder have in common and to discuss implications for creative thinking in
gifted education. The article begins with a brief, historical overview of the
topic, followed by some highlights of studies on creativity and mental illness.
Explanations for the possible link between creativity and madness are then
addressed. Creativity is defined as the production of something that is both
new and valued and madness is defined as a self destructive deviation in
behavior. Data were collected from books, medical journals and the article
concludes with a differentiation between genius and madness. And suggests the
need for a regular check up on psychoanalyst especially for children in gifted education
and also questions for further research.
INTRODUCTION
Men have called mad but the question
is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest
intelligence-whether much that is glorious-whether all that is profound-does
not spring from disease of thought-from moods of mind exalted at the expense of
the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which
escape those who dream only by night. In their grey vision they obtain glimpses
of eternity....They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast
ocean of the light affable. Edgar Allan Poe cited in Galloway ,
(43).
The relationship between mental illness, psychopathological disorders,
with creativity and genius has been evident for centuries and is still
debatable hitherto. For decades, scientist and psychologists have been
investigating the relationship between creativity and mental disorder in an
effect to substantiate or disprove the large body of anecdotal evidence that
suggest a link. Popular culture has long stereotyped poets, Artists and
creative scientists as depressed and mad .Rothenberg (24). In fact, the idea of
a link between creativity and mental illness goes back to the time of
Aristotle, when he wrote that eminent philosophers, politicians, poets and
artists all have tendencies toward "melancholia."
Since the time of the Greek philosophers,
those who wrote about the creative process emphasized that creativity involves
a regression to more primitive mental processes, that to be creative requires a
willingness to cross and re-cross the lines between rational and irrational
thought. What is the evidence that there is a link between creativity and
madness? What account can be given for this link, biologically and
psychologically? And what does this association suggest for related research
and our understanding of creative people
1.1
OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
This paper is to show possible link between
creativity and psychotic disorder. Marcel Proust said, "Everything great
in the world is created by neurotics. They have composed our masterpieces, but
we don't consider what they have cost their creators in sleepless nights, and
worst of all, fear of death." More recently, at the end of the last
century, physicians were very interested in the physical causes of mental
illness as well as in the genetic causes of genius. All this pointing out to
the desperate need to undergo this study.1.2 SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY
Since the time of Freud's analysis, other psychoanalysts
and psychologists have continued to conduct scores of pathographies, diagnostic
analysis of the works or lives of eminent creative people in an effort to
improve our understanding of the relationship between creativity and madness. Jamison,
Panter(23). In this century the clinical literature, particularly the
psychoanalytic writing, is full of theories about the relationship between
creativity and emotional illness Rothenberg (19).
1.3 DEFINATION OF TERMS
- Creativity: Adjective marked by
the ability or power to create : given to creating having the quality
of something created rather than imitated : imaginative managed so as
to get around legal or conventional limits; also, deceptively arranged so
as to conceal or defraud
·
Schizophrenia: Schizophrenia, severe mental illness
characterized by a variety of symptoms, including loss of contact with reality,
bizarre behavior, disorganized thinking and speech, decreased emotional
expressiveness, and social withdrawal. Usually only some of these symptoms
occur in any one person. The term schizophrenia comes from Greek words
meaning “split mind.”
- Dopamine: Dopamine,
chemical known as a neurotransmitter essential to the functioning of the
central nervous system. In the process of neurotransmission, dopamine is
transferred from one nerve cell, or neuron, to another, playing a key role
in brain function and human behavior.
- Thalamus: The thalamus consists of two rounded masses of gray
tissue lying within the middle of the brain, between the two cerebral
hemispheres. The thalamus is the main relay station for incoming sensory
signals to the cerebral cortex and for outgoing motor signals from it. All
sensory input to the brain, except that of the sense of smell, connects to
individual nuclei of the thalamus.
- Bipolar disorder: Bipolar
disorder is a mental illness that causes mood swings. In the manic phase,
a person might feel ecstatic, self-important, and energetic. But when the
person becomes depressed, the mood shifts to extreme sadness, negative
thinking, and apathy.
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Since the ancient Greeks,
observers of human behavior had proposed a link between madness and
creativity, a report published in 1994 examined this connection in a group of 15
visual artists whose psychiatric histories are well known.Ludwig (34). These
artists, abstract expressionists of the mid-20th-century New York School
Harvard researchers read the artists' medical records,
biographies, letters, and diaries to search for evidence of mental illness.
They diagnosed more than half with mood disorders such as depression,
compounded by alcoholism. Four of the artists — Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko,
Philip Guston, and William Baziotes — suffered severe depression, and two
others, Robert Motherwell and Arshile Gorky, suffered from milder depression.
Less certain documentation pointed to depression in Franz Kline and David
Smith. Six of the artists are known to have received psychiatric treatment. Two
of them — Gorky and Rothko — committed suicide, and Pollock and Smith died in
car accidents that, it is speculated, may have been suicides. About half of the
abstract expressionists died before age 60.
The researchers proposed that depression, by leading the
abstract expressionists to lonely contemplation of the purpose of life and the
possibility of death, may have spurred them to create, while at the same time
destroying their personal lives.
Jamison (122) -holds that artistic endeavours heal the
artist, whose work is then healing to others. It is important to note that the
studies tend to focus on a subpopulation of artists in particular: writers,
poets, and visual artists.
There are numerous examples of artists who used their work
to save their minds. For example, Anne Sexton, who was institutionalized for
her psychosis wrote, "Poetry led me by the hand out of madness". Jackson
Pollock's large canvas drippings have been viewed by several investigators as
an attempt to organize his chaotic inner life as stated by Feldman (89).
Wyshup, (70). A basic premise of the expressive therapies (e.g. art, music, and
dance therapy, etc.) is that writing, composing, or drawing, etc., is a means
to self-understanding, emotional stability and resolution of conflict.
Creativity provides a way to structure or reframe pain. This, perhaps, is what
much good comedy is about. Findings from Studies on Creativity and Mental Illness
in the last two decades show that there are numerous systematic investigations
into the alleged relationship between creativity and madness. Indeed, there are
numerous examples of famous creators--writers like Virginia Woolf, painters
like Vincent Van Gogh, composers like Robert Schumann--who have been highly
successful but had or are suspected to have had a mental illness.
Some studies have backed up this notion,
suggesting that writers, artists and others are more likely to have a mental
illness and that people with certain mental illnesses, such as depression and
mood disorders, appear somewhat more likely to be creative. While some
researchers have found that creative people are slightly more at-risk, others
have found more grave connections, such as that they are 30 percent more likely
to have bipolar disorder.
2.1 BIOILOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC FINDINGS
Kaufman(66) says the brains of creative
people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding
environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through
a process called "latent inhibition" - defined as an animal's
unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant
to its needs. According to Kenneth (73) creative individuals are much more
likely to have low levels of latent inhibition. "This means that creative
individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming
in from the environment," says lombrosso (35). "The normal person
classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is
much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person,
by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."
Ullén and his colleagues administered
psychological tests to 14 participants with no history of mental illness. The
tests were designed to measure creativity, asking the subjects to find many
different solutions to a problem. Those who did well on this test, and were
deemed "highly creative," had a lower density of specific receptors
in their brains for dopamine, called D2 receptors, in a region called the thalamus,
than did less creative people, according to Ullén. "Schizophrenics are
also known to have low D2 density in this part of the brain, suggesting a cause
of the link between mental illness and creativity," he said. The thalamus
serves as a kind of relay center, filtering information before it reaches areas
of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and
reasoning. "Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower
degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the
thalamus," Ullén said, and explains that this could be a possible
mechanism behind the ability of healthy highly
creative people to see numerous uncommon connections in a
problem-solving situation and the bizarre associations found in the mentally
ill. The results were published online May 17 in the journal PLUS ONE.
BIPOLAR DISORDER
Another study, which compared those within
the creative arts to those with professions such as public officials, business
men, etc, the creative individuals portrayed two to three times the rate of suicide
attempts, mood disorders, substance abuse and psychosis. This again suggested that artists are more
likely to have bipolar disorder than those of the general public. Similar
situations suggest that there is a heightening of creativity, which coincides
with the onset of the disorder. It involves the eventual deficit in information
processing systems, which in turn allows for a tendency towards creativity or
innovation. Additionally, bipolar disorder has an effect upon the following
neurological structures: the hippocampus, the hypothalamus and the cerebellum.
The alteration of these humerous structures may strengthen creativity. 19-year old student named, Akwaowo Umoh,
explained his ADD( Attention Deficit Disorder) as the following: “Being ADD
means you see things other people miss.CAUSES OF BIPOLAR DISORDER
The genes that a person inherits seem to have a strong influence on whether the person will develop bipolar disorder. Studies of twins provide evidence for this genetic influence. Among genetically identical twins where one twin has bipolar disorder, the other twin has the disorder in more than 70 percent of cases. But among pairs of fraternal twins, who have about half their genes in common, both twins have bipolar disorder in less than 15 percent of cases in which one twin has the disorder. The degree of genetic similarity seems to account for the difference between identical and fraternal twins. Further evidence for a genetic influence comes from studies of adopted children with bipolar disorder. These studies show that biological relatives of the children have a higher incidence of bipolar disorder than do people in the general population. Thus, bipolar disorder seems to run in families for genetic reasons. Personal or work-related stress can trigger a manic episode, but this usually occurs in people with a genetic vulnerability. Other factors—such as prenatal development, childhood experiences, and social conditions—seem to have relatively little influence in causing bipolar disorder. One study examined the children of identical twins in which only one member of each pair of twins had bipolar disorder. The study found that regardless of whether the parent had bipolar disorder or not, all of the children had the same high 10-percent rate of bipolar disorder. This observation clearly suggests that risk for bipolar illness comes from genetic influence, not from exposure to a parent’s bipolar illness or from family problems caused by that illness.
Historical
Overview
The notion that inspiration requires regression and
dipping into irrationality in order to access unconscious symbols and thought
has been popular across disciplines for hundreds of years. Plato said that
creativity is a "divine madness...a gift from the gods." Seneca
recorded Aristotle as having said, "No great genius was without a mixture
of insanity" .Langsdorf, (90-91). One of Shakespeare's characters says, "The
lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact," and
Marcel Proust said, "Everything great in the world is created by
neurotics. They have composed our masterpieces, but we don't consider what they
have cost their creators in sleepless nights, and worst of all, fear of
death."
More recently, at the end of the last century, physicians
were very interested in the physical causes of mental illness as well as in the
genetic causes of genius. The physician, Lombroso (89), wrote about the connections
he believed to exist between genius and madness. Acceptance of his ideas
persisted well into the 20th century until Lewis Terman's (25) data suggested
that people of
high ability exhibited less incidence of mental illness
and adjustment problems than average. But at the same time that Terman was
beginning to publish the first round of his results, Freud was formulating his
psychoanalytic concepts in Vienna
3.0 CONCLUSION
The
different between a mad man and a genius is not in the quantity of work but in
the quality of their work. Genius is organized madness, while madness is
chaotic. Often the organization of genius is on original lines, and
ill-balanced, so ignorant medicine-men mistake it for disorder. Crowley
Until then, the situation is cogently expressed by this old joke:
A man is driving past a mental hospital when one of the wheels falls off his car. He stops and recovers the wheel but can't find the lug nuts to secure it back in place. Just then he notices a man sitting on the curb carefully removing small pebbles from the grass and piling them neatly on the sidewalk.
"What am I going to do?" the man asks aloud. The fellow piling the pebbles looks up, and says, "Take one of the lug nuts from each of the other wheels and use them to put the wheel back on."
The driver is amazed. "Wow!" he exclaims. "What a brilliant idea. What are you doing in a place like this?" he asks, nodding toward the mental institution.
"Well," the man answers, "I'm crazy, not stupid."
"That's exactly what our research is about,".
"It shows that, to be creative, you can be bright and crazy, but not
stupid."
