Is Depression Inevitable for Artists and Creatives?

The information I came up with about depression, although helpful for those who want to have a better idea what it looks like - and holding some hints towards identifying the illness - still leaves me wondering if creative people are just plain destined to experience it come hell or high water. 

Arnold Ludwig wondered the same thing. Lucky for us, he didn't get distracted from Psychology and swept up in clay (you can probably guess who did that).

As a result he's now a professor, and a researcher at the University of Kentucky Medical Center.

Also an MD - so he's just the guy to find out more about this.

And he did! In fact, it was a study of 1004 men and women over the span of 10-years. His group was made up of a wide variety of accomplished people in just as wide a variety of professions, including art, music, science, business, politics, and sports.

In the end, he found:

• between 59 and 77 percent of the artists, writers, and musicians suffered mental illness  especially "mood disorders"
• compared to just 18 to 29 percent in the less artistic professionals

Time for me to say "Bingo" again.

And other studies have shown higher rates of depression in creative people too, the differences in various studies only being in the percentage gaps.

How depressing. So could we look on the bright side and connect the two saying that having a mental illness make people more creative?

Our Doctor Ludwig thinks not - or not exactly -  in The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy saying

"Mental illness is not the price people pay for their creative gifts... creative people who are mentally ill find themselves, almost by default, in the arts rather than in business or the other sciences."

Ah - so we're in creative fields because people will put up with our foibles because we are artists? I obviously need to read more before I accept that on the face of it

Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, addresses these questions in her book, Touched with Fire, as well. And there's plenty more where those came from. So there seems to be a lot more reading in my future

If you want to dip your toe into the wealth of information out there in the brain-pool you might want to

• Download this pdf article from Science news about CreativeMelancholy

or to look at:

• Arnold M. Ludwig: The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy

• Kay Redfield Jamison: Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament

• C. Diane Ealy: Woman's Book of Creativity
• Daniel Nettle: Strong Imagination

• Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance

• National Foundation for Depressive Illness

• Artists and Depression Forum

Comments

[Elaine]

I thing creative people are so distracted because of Attention Defficit Disorder that they seem nutty at times. I know most of the crafty prople I know are ADD or Dislexic. I think the Lord gives us each a gift and takes other things away. I am very creative and can make just about anything I set out to do. On the other hand dont ask me to sit behind a desk and keep files or money in organized order. It just will never happen. I feel if us creative people worked harder at what we are good at and gave thanks for it every day the Lord would bless us in so many other ways. Dont think about what you arent able to do. Just be happy your healthy and happy and able to create beautiful things like the Creator Himself.