Science
Related: About this forumSecrets of the Creative Brain
by Nancy Andreasen
As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, Ive had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegutdear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegutwill always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the universitys psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study.
He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mothers Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II. His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician, recounts his experiences in two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric problems. My mother, my cousins, and my sisters werent doing so great, he writes. We had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and other issues.?)
While mental illness clearly runs in the Vonnegut family, so, I found, does creativity. Kurts father was a gifted architect, and his older brother Bernard was a talented physical chemist and inventor who possessed 28 patents. Mark is a writer, and both of Kurts daughters are visual artists. Kurts work, of course, needs no introduction.
For many of my subjects from that first studyall writers associated with the Iowa Writers Workshopmental illness and creativity went hand in hand. This link is not surprising. The archetype of the mad genius dates back to at least classical times, when Aristotle noted, Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia. This pattern is a recurring theme in Shakespeares plays, such as when Theseus, in A Midsummer Nights Dream, observes, The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact. John Dryden made a similar point in a heroic couplet: Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
more
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/06/secrets-of-the-creative-brain/372299/
littlemissmartypants
(22,600 posts)Xipe Totec
(43,888 posts)Bookmarked for later....Kick
DamnYankeeInHouston
(1,365 posts)Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)(Many of those who, without even being psychopaths, accomodate themselves comfortably within sick societies are the real loons, natch. If you'll forgive the ironic terminology, please friends.)
defacto7
(13,485 posts)greiner3
(5,214 posts)That my bi-polar traits link me to some famous/infamous genetic ancestor.
It's my paternal ancestors, at least for the last 4 generations that I can trace each individuals' mental health.
But the 5th generation is the question mark.
He immigrated to New Orleans right before the Civil War, served in the Southern army but by the end of the war he was living in Buffalo.