Them Crazy Writers and Their Crazy Friends
March 25th, 2007 by 
Rory Harper
Posting about Roky Erickson got me to thinking again about the nature of creative individuals.
I’ll probably write more on the subject in the future, since it’s fascinated me for years, but for tonight, a quick hit-and-run. I’ll just toss some stuff out and see if any of it sticks to your inner walls.
We had a discussion here at EOB, following Maureen’s ‘Dancing in the Dark‘, which I took off into the ditch, about what alienated little monsters some of us were (and are), and this post is a follow-up to that, too.
Yes, there are some very bright people who are happy, well-adjusted, and comfortable in their surroundings.
But they’re less-likely to be highly creative, according to the research.
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Frank Barron was one of the dominant figures in creativity research. His 1969 tests on highly creative writers, mathematicians, and architects is still considered a landmark. He intensively tested them with the MMPI, interviews, and other tools, and found that highly creative people tested in the top ten percent of the population for psychopathology on nearly all of the MMPI’s scales. They suffered from paranoia, depression, mania, and anger, and were schizoptypal, just for starters. Pretty messed-up, in other words. Unusually, and very differently from non-creative people with lots of illness, they also had a pretty high self-regard. Whatever was messing them up was also working for them in important ways.
(A caveat to the above paragraph — I’m writing about this from memory. I have the original research in a box here somewhere, but it seems to be behind pay walls on the Net, so no link. I’d love it if somebody could find a full print on-line somewhere.)
I know that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. But the research returns again and again to the conclusion that highly creative people are much more likely to suffer from mental and emotional disorders than the general population.
I’ve hung around most of my life with writers, artists, and musicians. The research is a mirror held up in front of all of them. Maybe even in front of me. The catch is — you’ve always got to remember that people who are creative often have severe emotional disorders, but having severe emotional disorders doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a creative person. Uh, well, schizotypals, maybe.
Here’s Antonio’s little paper that summarizes some of these points nicely, especially making me feel a whole lot better about having that whole cyclothymia thing happening for all of those years. As a side dish, it also ties creativity research into AI research.
Historically, whenever I’ve mentioned this you, I get annoyed rejection of the concept, with you saying that you don’t have to be messed-up to be creative. And that you are not a disturbed individual yourself, dammit.
Or you shrug and say that this is all totally obvious to you and has been for a long time. Bored now.
Or you’re relieved and delighted to find that it’s not just that you’re messed-up and too stupid to figure out how to get better, that it’s a semi-normal and sorta-okay thing for you to be as you are, that there are actually positive correlations between your suffering and your creativity.
Maybe you shouldn’t get better, if you want to be creative?
How’s that for messed-up?
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Incidentally, there’s research indicating that highly creative people have more sex partners. Another bonus, you slut.
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: Pic credit to Rachael Harper. Who is Awesome, as we all know.
Posted in Art, Daily Life, Rachael is Awesome, Rory, Science, Writing | 
13 Comments »
March 25th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Hmmmm. All of my personal experience is that highly creative people survive abusive and traumatic situations with less damage than non-creative people.
And you’re a slut, too! (Call me.)
March 26th, 2007 at 5:16 am
How much of this is self-creation, though, post-Portrait of the Artist and such? These are complicated topics.
I don’t think that Bosch was stable or sane, but Bach was. And Mozart, Amadeus aside. There are many lunatics who think of themselves as artists because of their imbalance, and I suspect many artists create themselves as lunatics.
I’ve also been considering (from another context) the idea that people who see the cracks in “certainties” are always a bit worried. There are always cracks, and they’re not always easy to fill in. Most people ignore the cracks they’re not interested in. Some people have a harder time filtering – an advantage when you’re trying to figure something out, and a disadvantage when you’re trying to operate normally in society. The image that comes to mind is Monk.
All people come into contact with adversity and human darkness. One might even describe it as common.
I’ll go with Steve here, and say that most of the cretative folk I know (the ones that really do good stuff) are resilient. There would be nothing interesting about their creation if it sampled none of the darkness, and nothing compelling if it didn’t rise above it.
March 26th, 2007 at 8:49 am
I can’t confirm this, but I did read once about a study at the University of Iowa’s writing program on this showed that the people enrolled in the program tended to score significantly higher than the population at large for bipolar and depressive symptoms (although of course, not all of them.) But the study went on and did family trees with the participants discussing behaviors like drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide, and a bunch of other markers and discovered that the participants with symptoms of mood disorders were often the among the people in their family who were least disturbed.
So creativity may arise, in some people, as a way of coping. All I know is that my family tree is littered with the wreckage of depression. Me, I thank modern pharmaceuticals.
March 26th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Goddamn you make me hot.
March 26th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
I’m pretty flaky this Monday morning, so please excuse if the following doesn’t flow well –
This issue gets complicated quickly of course, because for every example, you can find a counter-example.
And you can quickly get into a discussion about what’s mental and emotional illness and what’s just seeing things clearly, however unpleasant it might be.
I tend to think about the bell curve a lot when I go to these places. There’s a distribution curve, and highly creative types disproportionately test out as being mentally and emotionally ‘different’, in ways that are pathological for most people. Some creative people are models of mental health. But they’re rarer, I think.
Alden’s post addresses two important issues — 1. The chicken-and-the-egg one, about which comes first, the craziness or the creativity. And, 2. How much of the craziness is self-inflicted self-creation.
I do think that there are mythologies and romanticizations about creative people being unstable, and that some people use their creativity as an excuse to be assholes or be messed-up. But I think that for most of us, the messed-upness is not by choice. It hurts too much.
And the craziness comes first. The creativity is a coping method, as Maureen said.
…I have some really scattered and self-contradictory opinions on this constellation of subjects.
For instance, I do feel that highly creative people tend to be more resilient. They have to be. The world is a harder place for them, because they can’t accept common wisdom and perceptions and relax. As Alden says, they keep seeing the cracks, and having to cope with that.
However, I’ve known some very fucked-up and miserable creative people who weren’t being resilient or coping well. Including me, for chunks of my life. It wasn’t voluntary or romantic. I can make the case that someone less creative might not have survived or continued to function as well.
My perception is a bit different from Steve’s, though his might well be closer to the bone. I don’t have a history of abuse or trauma as a child. Just loneliness, as my family moved fairly often.
Fiction, which connected me to the rest of humanity, was my best, and only constant, friend. Big surprise that this led to me wanting to write fiction.
Then we get into the whole thing about neurochemistry. How much of this stuff is just plain genetic, with a common linkage between mental illness and creativity? And why?
March 26th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
I’m not seeing any references to papers; mainly books (but that makes sense; the family wouldn’t get royalties from a paper), and nothing on JSTOR except him reviewing another person’s novel.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Obsession, often the result of mental illness, is still the driver of best fiction.
Just did an interview with up-and-comer Greg Van Eekhout and he quoted some weird person named Maureen McHugh from back in 1999, when he went to Viable Paradise.
“She told me that the things that make really compelling fiction are the things that obsess us. Before that I was trying to emulate stories that I admired technically…”
If we don’t find it compelling, it’s doubtful our readers will. And our obsessions are really compelling.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Ken — Yep. This is 40 year old research. You’d think it would be out there on the net, but I sure can’t find it. If I can get my act together, I’ll go digging in the boxes this weekend and see what I can unearth. I once did a seminar on the subject, and xeroxed a lot of different relevant research. I’m pretty sure I still have it.
Steve — Oh, hell, yes. Obsession with a story is absolutely the key, usually to the point where it crowds out the rest of your life. As most of us here have experienced, I surmise.
Is creative obsession an illness if it leads to you being able to support yourself better, maybe even become rich and famous?
March 27th, 2007 at 11:22 am
This gets into the metal illness definition.
It’s illness to the degree it impacts your ability to live your life in the way you want to. You have to factor in a social aspects here, too. Sociopaths probably want to live their lives in a way the rest of us have a problem with and all that.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:39 am
“Metal illness.” I like it. I think I have metal illness. (Metal is renowned for its ductility and resilience…)
March 27th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Heavy metal illness for those who have a severe case….
March 28th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
My experience in the wonderful world of depression is that though it might make you creative for a while, eventually you lose the ability to get things done due to the fatigue, lack of focus, and general malaise depression induces. And those distracting suicidal thoughts.
But other than that, it’s dandy!
March 28th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Sounds like you mostly only got half the package, Caroline. The depression sucks, but the mania can be a blast.
Up-down-up-down-up-down can wear your ass out, though.