“We musicians seem to be willing to self destruct in order to achieve our goals. We are willing to suffer any obstacle in order to recreate the great masterworks of music with passion." *

We like to put people on pedestals. We also want front row seats, so we can bear witness to their self destruction. Musicians have been known to self destruct. Other creative people: poets, actors, scientists, philosophers, painters and writers, have all displayed a self destructiveness over the course of history. Musicians and highly creative people in general, have always walked the fine line of the world's psychiatric analysis and it has encouraged them to behold in themselves some flaw, some separateness.

The gatekeepers to the definition of sane, would have creative people believe because they are creative they have tendencies toward suffering a mental illness. But these "illnesses" however real or imagined are actually relative to the population. Highly creative people are set apart in some ways, but they have no more a propensity to madness than their non-creative counterparts.

I agree for the most part with this statement made by an anonymous poster on a discussion board on this subject on May 5 2009:

"Anyone who knows something of the psychology of creativity, also knows that creative people suffer more severely from social pressures than 'adapted people' because they are more sensitive to them, because their creative drive is emotional in nature, not rational, and they have to rely upon them without the security of rational argument which makes them extra vulnerable to hostility from the environment." (2)

Psychiatry has finally been forced to admit (if not to themselves then to the population it treats) that most of the brain and it's intricate essential make-up is unknown to them. There are many behaviors, tendencies and mechanics of the mind they do not understand. Anyone willing to spend some real time conducting in-depth study, can find many flaws with the theory of 'creativity equals mental illness'.

If you play music with passion and love and honesty, then it will nourish your soul, heal your wounds and make your life worth living. Music is it's own reward. ~Sting

Yes, highly creative people in all of the arts and sciences have sometimes displayed manic depression, schizophrenia and other related psychiatric psychoses, but within the population of the millions of creative people, variably most of them live out their lives by society's standards of "normal." And remember too, one man's sanity has always been anothers lunacy (vice versa).

I found the following quite real and amusing, a humorous hitting of the proverbial nail on the head in part:

"Being creative is a tortuous process. First we torture ourselves as we try to find a creative way to show an idea. Then we're tortured by the average minds who laugh and watch as we torture ourselves. Then we're tortured by the people who sell our ideas to all those average minds, because the only way to sell to an average mind is to average-out the idea. And if the idea still doesn't sell, well, now the torture really begins. The only entity in that equation more tortured than a man with an idea, is the idea itself." (3)

Andrea Marie Kuszewski, a researcher from Bogotá, Columbia recently posted research papers on: The Genetics of Creativity: A Serendipitous Assemblage of Madness. She seems to believe in the hypothesis that creativity and madness are linked. Yet the opening statement to her papers says:

“Creativity is a subject that has been relatively neglected in psychological research until recently. The difficulty in defining and measuring creativity has been a contributing factor to the small amount of research in this area to date.” (4)

If this is so, how is it that we already have a diagnosis linking highly creative people to mental illnesses from the Psychiatric profession?

"Music - The one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend." - Ludwig van Beethoven

According to a recent Gallup Survey there are nearly 63 million musicians in the United States; professional and non-professionals pursuing the creation of music. Music is a part of human DNA. Even before birth, we are exposed to music and song. And truly, every one of us, carries their own soul song within them.

It is the one life essence that is common to us all, so deep and all encompassing that it literally connects us to every other human being. Regardless of race, continent or society, it bypasses any politics or religion. It is bound by no language, no law, no definitions. Music's intention is unconditional. It exists without asking for anything but an instrument. It gives everything that it is. Music has it's own brain.

Perhaps from this we might speculate that musicians as opposed to non-musicians do as well? Have a separate sort of brain I mean. We know that there are some for whom music is so compelling and innately powerful, they are unable to contain it within themselves. They can no more separate themselves form music as they could their own limb. And that world is where the artist revolves and evolves. They don't choose, they get chosen. There are people who love music and there are those who are music.

We get to look through their glass, find our affinities in them. They are our reflections in the mirror. Perhaps we are all in the throes of mental illness? Certain Associations would have us wonder as much. We have never been so medicated in all of history. I for one grow weary of the psychoanalysis. Is the psychiatric community justified in leading us to believe that creative people possess some inherent madness that propels them toward creativity? Is their creativity born from madness?

Certainly creativity can become so powerful that it can cause great anxiety, fear, contradiction, sadness. Yes, perhaps madness exists within us all to some degree. But why is there a need to continuously link creativity to some disorder? Is it a fear in ways we don't understand that we have in ourselves? Do we wish to glimpse inside some deviant or mysterious room that we don't have the key for?

Below is a partial list of some of the names of the people from Kay Jamison's book: Touched With Fire; Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. It is meant only to give the reader a resource for further study and is meant to be an illustrative not comprehensive list.

KEY:

H = Asylum or psychiatric hospital

S = Suicide

SA = Suicide attempt

Famous Poets with Bi Polar Disorders:

Marina Tsvetayeva (S)
Walt Whitman (S)
Charles Baudelaire (SA)
Ernest Dowson
T.S. Eliot (H)
Randal Jarrell (H, S)
Samuel Johnson
John Keats - More
Louis MacNeice
Osip Mandelstam (H, SA)
Vladimir Mayakovsky (S)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (H)
Boris Pasternak (H)
Sylvia Plath (H, S)
Edgar Allan Poe (SA)
Ezra Pound (H)
Alexander Pushkin
Theodore Roethke (H)
Anne Sexton (H, S)
Percy Bysshe Shelley - More (SA)
Sara Teasdale (H, S)
Alfred, Lord tennyson
Dylan Thomas

Famous Writers with Bi Polar Disorders:

Hans Christian Andersen
James Barrie
William Faulkner (H)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (H)
Maxim Gorky (SA)
Kenneth Graham
Ernest Hemingway (H, S)
Hermann Hesse (H, SA)
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
Charles Dickens
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Herman Melville
Eugene O'Neill (H, SA)
Mary Shelley
Jean Stafford (H)
Robert Louis Stevenson
Leo Tolstoy
Tennessee Williams (H)
Mary Wollstonecraft (SA)
Virginia Woolf (H, S)

Famous Musicians & Composers with Bipolar Disorders:

Composers

Anton Bruckner (H)
George Frederic Handel
Charles Ives
Otto Klemperer (H)
Gustav Mahler
Modest Mussorgsky
Sergey Rachmaninoff
Giocchino Rossini
Robert Schumann (H, SA)
Alexander Scriagbin
Peter Tchaikovsky

Nonclassical composers and musicians

Irving Berlin (H)
Noel Coward
Stephen Foster
Charles Mingus (H)
Charles Parker (H, SA)
Cole Porter (H)
Kurt Cobain, musician (Nirvana) (S 1994)

Famous Artists with Bipolar Disorders:

Ralph Barton (S)
Francesco Bassano (S)
Ralph Blakelock (H)
Francesco Borromini (S)
John Sell Cotman
Richard Dadd (H)
Edward Dayes (S)
Thomas Eakins
Paul Gauguin (SA)
Theodore Gericault
Hugo van der Goes
Vincent van Gogh (H, S)
Arshile Gorky (S)
Philip Guston (H)
George Innes (SA)
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Adolphe Monticelli
Edvard Munch (H)
Georgia O'Keeffe (H)
Jackson Pollock (H)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (SA)
Pietro Testa (S)
George Frederic Watts
Sir David Wilkie

The partial list is long enough but there are hundreds on the list. As one sees, there is good cause perhaps why those in the psychiatric fields may conclude there is a definite link between creativity and mental disorder.

And are those who have mental illness simply in denial? Would they even recognize their own illness? It could very well be that without their "illness", such creative genius that flows forth from them might be impossible. Is it a curse, a blessing, both or neither? Creativity will always return to us our imagination and our magic. If this is all born from madmen, from some dis-ease, could it be the most glorious madness we have ever imagined?

Perhaps no analysis is necessary. Perhaps it simply is.

I neither advocate that mental illness is acceptable, in the sense of the harm it may do to a person, nor that if a person seeks medication to control their illness that it is either a bad or good thing. I am not in the business of medicine.

But creativity itself is not a madness. It needs no analysis, no diagnosis. Whatever shall we do with ourselves other than to create, from wherever that emanates from? Whatever can we do but learn to live with ourselves and our creativity in the only way we know how? Perhaps in the future we may have clearer answers to these questions?

* Janet Horvath; Associate Principal Cellist - Minnesota Orchestra

(2) Creative minds: the links between mental illness and creativity:
Roger Dobson, The Independant/©independent.co.uk Tuesday, 5 May 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/features/creative- minds-the-links-between-mental-illness-and-creativity-1678929.html

(3) Ahmad A. Jordan: Is Everybody Creative? My Head Space
http://www.my-head-space.com/musings.asp?slno=77

(4) Kuszewski, Andrea Marie,The Genetics of Creativity: A Serendipitous Assemblage of Madness(March 1, 2009). METODO Working Papers, No. 58. Available at SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1393603