Posted by SalArmy4me on August 28, 2001, at 21:11:10
In reply to Creative Work and Meds - Problems? Success?, posted by Zo on August 28, 2001, at 15:36:12
Clare, Anthony W.. Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. British Journal of Psychiatry. 171(10):395, Oct 97
"It was Lord Byron who observed that "addiction to poetry is generally the result of an uneasy mind in an uneasy body. Disease or deformity have haunted many of our best; Collins, mad; Pope, crooked; Milton, blind". He knew what he was talking about. A profound and pervasive melancholia, singular mental instability and suicide seamed through both the Scottish and English sides of his family. As a child he was fiery, passionate and depressed. As he grew older these aspects of his temperament became more marked, his volatility and `savage moods' more severe and his desire for death more stated. He became markedly insightful, once noting that "There are some natures that have a predisposition to grief as others have to disease... The causes that have made me wretched would probably not have decomposed, or at least more than decomposed another". Byron, that most romantic of the Romantics, embodies the two key and central arguments of this powerful and compelling book, namely that there is a highly significant association between two temperaments - the artistic and the manic-depressive - and that the variability and fluxes of mood are important in igniting thought, changing perceptions, creating chaos, forcing order on that chaos and enabling transformation.
There have been many case history studies of the psychopathology of artists including those by Cesare Lombroso, Francis Galton, Havelock Ellis, Adele Juda, Arnold Ludwig, Nancy Andreasen, Hagop Akiskal and Felix Post. Kay Jamison's analysis is, however, the most extensive, scrupulous and ultimately the most convincing argument yet in favour of the hypothesis that the relationship between manic-depression and creativity is greater than chance. In support of that argument, she draws attention to the creative importance of certain types of experience whose existence is due to extreme emotional states. She draws on what is known of the genetic basis of manic-depression and examines the rich psychiatric histories or pedigrees of several major literary and artistic families including those of Byron, Tennyson, Melville, the Jameses, Schumann, Coleridge, Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. There is the usual list of poets, writers, composers and artists believed to have been mood-disordered but Jamison, on the basis of an impressive understanding of available biographical information, goes further and applies contemporary diagnostic classificatory frames to what is known of their mental states, and indicates where hospitalisation, suicide attempts and suicide were in the mix. The result, in an appendix at the end of the book, is a truly awesome league, which includes Berryman, Clare, Cowper, Eliot, Jarrell, Millais, Pasternak, Plath, Pound, Sexton, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hesse, Lamb, Lowry, Munch, O'Neill, Ruskin, Williams, Woolf, Schumann, Van Gogh, Bruckner, O'Keefe, Pollock, Celan, Crane, Poe, Conrad, Gorky, Berlioz, Wollstonecraft, Borromini, Gauguin and Rothko.
Graham Greene argued that creativity is itself an antidepressant and wondered "how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation". Jamison refrains from such Romantic gloom and acknowledges the more prosaic fact that many writers and artists have no family or personal history of manic-depression. She does not argue that all writers are depressed, suicidal or manic. She argues rather that a greatly disproportionate number of them are; that the manic-depressive and artistic temperaments are causally related to each other."
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