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Are great artists more likely to be crazy?

Eric Barker
March 28, 2012

Successful artists are not more likely to have schizophrenia but they have epic rates of depression and bipolar disorder.

Via Imagine: How Creativity Works:

Andreasen found that 80 percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some type of depression. These successful artists werenât crazyâ they were just exceedingly sad.

And:

âSuccessful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but wonât go down,â Andreasen says. âTheyâll stick with it until itâs right. And that seems to be what the mood disorders help with.â While Andreasen acknowledges the terrible burden of mental illnessâ she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a âgift of the Museâ and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the painâ she argues that, at least in its milder forms, the disorder benefits many artists due to the perseverance it makes possible. âUnfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,â Andreasen says. âIf youâre at the cutting edge, then youâre going to bleed.â

And:

bipolar disorder, an illness in which people oscillate between intense sadness and extreme euphoria, is so closely associated with creativity. Andreasen found that nearly 40 percent of the successful creative people she investigated had the disorder, a rate thatâs approximately twenty times higher than it is in the general population. (More recently, the psychiatrist Hagop Akiskal found that nearly two-thirds of a sample of influential European artists were bipolar. ) The reason for this correlation, Andreasen suggests, is that the manic states lead people to erupt with new ideas as their brains combust with remote associations.

TheRedArchive is an archive of Red Pill content, including various subreddits and blogs. This post has been archived from the blog bakadesuyo.

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Post Information
Title Are great artists more likely to be crazy?
Author Eric Barker
Date March 28, 2012 4:18 PM UTC (11 years ago)
Blog bakadesuyo
Archive Link https://theredarchive.com/blog/bakadesuyo/are-great-artists-more-likely-to-be-crazy.14466
https://theredarchive.com/blog/14466
Original Link https://www.bakadesuyo.com/2012/03/are-great-artists-more-likely-to-be-crazy/
You can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea.

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