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What is common among these highly accomplished personalities?

 

Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, T S Eliot, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Michelangelo, Friedrich Nietzsche, Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway, Akira Kurosawa, Vincent Van Gogh, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, John Keats, Kurt Vonnegut, William Blake and Virginia Woolf. 

 

They all had battled depression. Unfortunately, some lost the battle and took their own lives.

Over centuries, many renowned artists and thinkers, across various disciplines, and influential personalities who shaped history have spoken about their battle with inner demons, a sense of inexplicable sadness, grief and self-hatred even as their brilliant artistic output touched the hearts of millions across the world.

 

At the launch of his authorised biography “Notes of a Dream” in Chennai a few years ago, Oscar-winning composer A R Rahman spoke about how he was tormented by suicidal thoughts and a sense of worthlessness during his early 20s, a phase of intense creative outbursts.

 

The ‘Mozart of Madras’ eventually managed to wriggle out of the difficult phase, bagged a national award at 25 and went on to become one of the most popular composers of our time. Rahman’s initial struggle with his inner demons fits into a popular perception that creative people are often tortured souls with bouts of depression, mood swings and an underlying sense of melancholy defining their life journeys. 

 

Melancholy, the root of art?

Are creative people essentially melancholic and depressive? And, more importantly, does melancholy enhance creativity? Experts have been wrestling with these questions but there are no clear answers as yet.

 

The research projects probing the possible link between mental illness and creativity have thrown up divergent findings, though the idea that “great art stems from great pain” has been a compelling one. It has strong roots, dating back to ancient philosophers and poets and an aura of glamour is attached to mental illness since the Romantic Era because it was widely seen in those days as “voyaging into new planes of  reality.” The research findings, suggesting conflicting scenarios, have not received widespread acceptance, leaving experts divided on the question.

Popular fiction loves to cast high-performing lead characters as struggling with some form of mental illness, sometimes as if to suggest that their creative prowess and illness are inextricably linked. However, it is often unfair to characterize the works of an artist as the outcomes of mood disorders, since doing so would take the credit away from their insight and hard work. Positioning an artist as a struggler, aberrant from society, and wrestling with inner demons is part of a romantic narrative of the 19th century.

 

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Take the case of Vincent Van Gogh, among the most prolific and famous post-impressionist Dutch painter, who committed suicide at 37 following years of battling with depression. It can be argued that he just happened to be mentally ill as well as creative. “Oh, if I could have worked without this accursed disease - what things I might have done?,” he had famously said of his inner struggle. 

 

Tortured geniuses

 

Tragically, some of the great minds in history lost the battle with inner demons and took their own lives. Among them were Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, David Foster Wallace, Robin Williams, Kurt Cobain, John Berryman, Hart Crane and Mark Rothko.

 

“Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia,” said Aristotle. This pattern is a recurring theme in Shakespeare’s plays as well. “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity,” said Eliot. “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star,” said Friedrich Nietzsche. “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know,” said Hemingway.

 

Darwin, who propounded the theory of evolution, spoke about how depression left him “not able to do anything one day out of three,” choking on his “bitter mortification” and confessed to “hysterical crying”

 

Science has no clear answer

 

The cognitive-neuroscience community is divided on whether a scientific link between creativity and mental illness actually exists. The attempts to resolve the question, mainly focusing on disorders of mood, have so far struggled to reach a definitive answer. Some studies have shown an increased activity in a region of the prefrontal cortex area of the brains of patients with clinical depression. The hyperactivity in this region, which is responsible for avoiding distractions and maintaining controlled focus, leads to more attentive and analytical processing of thoughts, potentially explaining superior intelligence of certain kinds among the chronically depressed.

 

However, a comprehensive study, conducted recently in Albany State University, has demonstrated that creativity has little to no bearing on psychopathology. Overall, differences in creativity between people with mood disorder and healthy controls were statistically non-significant, although the significance varied based on type of disorder and the approach adopted by the study. There is little evidence that a mood disorder makes one more creative. The research doesn’t fully resolve the long-running questions about whether and how mood disorders and creativity are linked, but it does pour cold water on some perspectives, such as expecting those struggling with a disorder to thrive creatively.

 

Life is beautiful

 

It must be pointed out that there are many geniuses who are not mentally ill, and there are plenty of mentally ill people who are not geniuses. People suffering from temporary mood disorders do not exhibit increased creativity during the same short period. Life presents itself in all its hues and it is the keen observational ability and empathy to take it all in--the good and the bad--that makes the artist stand apart. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the Russian composer whose glorious symphonies have touched millions globally and who himself battled with melancholy, asserts that “life is beautiful in spite of everything!”

 

It is the depth of our feeling, the detail of our gaze, the ability to see and measure the contrast of the joys and sorrows that feed our creativity.