Insanity and The Artist
“Therefore I remind you to stir up the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” – 2nd Tim. 6-7
“If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, know that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” – GK Chesterton
Associations between madness and art are as old as western culture. Aristotle identified a tendency to melancholia in the artistic temperament; Shakespeare produced multiple variations on the theme of lunatics and poets being “of imagination all compact”; and Dryden coined the notion of a “thin partition” between wit and insanity.
Research in the area, though piecemeal, reveals distinctly higher rates of psychiatric conditions – most particularly mood disorders – among artists and writers. In her 1993 study Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness And The Artistic Temperament, Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, concluded that among distinguished artists she investigated, the rate of affective disorders was 10-30 times more prevalent than in the general population.
Nancy Andreasen, chair of psychiatry at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine, studied 30 authors from the university’s famous writers’ workshop and discerned that artists, though prone to emotional disorders, do not have high rates of schizophrenia – but their families do. The suggestion is that some features associated with schizophrenia, which haven’t developed into a psychosis, may confer some kind of creative originality. Hypomania (moderate levels of manic experience) can produce extraordinary periods of energy and concentration, followed by a plunge into depression. It may, in some people, confer benefits as well as deficits.
Most of us will either experience, or come close to, a mental illness, be it basic depression or a dementia preceding death. The fact that we shun it does not make it any the less a human universal. And it would be odd if such elemental experiences were not connected to creative urges. As Wittgenstein said, reflecting on his own trials with mental illness: “If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.”
I have worked for many high profile artists both “insane” and as “normal” as the farmer in Kansas. From my perspective, there is always something interesting about their personalities, but the thing most common is their constant drive to exercise their gift, sometimes at the expense of themselves and those closest to them, and sometimes to the benefit of all. Wish they were all the latter, but also wish that life was closer to the fairy tales where the heroes were always extremely sane………