Creativity in Suffering: Why Creative Minds Suffer, and How Art Can Help Channel Emotions
Visual, Auditory & Written Arts all aim to express, convey or interpret emotions. Some would argue that great artists are those who can achieve this through their work. However, one cannot truly represent a feeling without having felt it themselves. That is the burden an artist carries.
William Utermohlen's Autoportraits’ evolution over the course of the progression of Alzheimer’s disease (1967 – 2000)
Many renown artists have had troubled lives. Edvard Munch had a strict religious upbringing, lost both his mother and sister to tuberculosis, and later fell into alcoholism. Amedeo Modigliani contracted multiple severe illnesses, became addicted to drugs and died at the age of 35. Sylvia Plath lost her father at a young age, suffered from depression and later killed herself in her own kitchen. All of these minds had one thing in common – they found refuge in different forms of artistic expression. Many other artists suffered the same fate, some only trying to be heard and understood until it was too late, only receiving recognition posthumously. No wonder the “Tortured Artist” stereotype exists. Would it simply be anecdotal to conclude that creative people tend to be troubled?
Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son
Sadly, there is some truth behind this conclusion. The Karolinska institute in Sweden tracked over 1 million Swedes and their relatives. The results found that people working in creative fields, including authors, photographers and dancers, were 8% more likely to live with bipolar disorder. Writers were a staggering 121% more likely to suffer from the condition, and nearly 50% more likely to commit suicide than the general population. Furthermore, psychiatrists at Semmelweis University in Hungary, gave 128 participants a creativity test followed by a blood test. They found that those who demonstrated the greatest creativity carried a gene associated with severe mental disorders.
Interestingly, when looking at the brain activity of creative people, results suggest that creatives take in more information and are less able to ignore extraneous details – or as American Psychologist S. B. Kaufman would put it, "It seems that the key to creative cognition is opening up the flood gates and letting in as much information as possible […]; sometimes the most bizarre associations can turn into the most productively creative ideas”.
Although this information paints a bleak picture of the creative mind, the reality is that it remains a case-by-case scenario – being creative does not imply having suffered, but it may be associated with it. The same institute in Sweden that came to the aforementioned conclusions points out that dancers, directors and other visual artists demonstrated mental illnesses less frequently than the general population. Artists may use their work to express their emotions as a form of therapy, sometimes leading to a better understanding of their ailments and thus learning to identify and overcome their negative thoughts or mental illnesses. Sometimes suffering is an important part of life – those that overcome it will only be stronger.
Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing in White Nights