Artist, writer, dramatist, actor, poet, Jean Cocteau
If someone you know seems to have suddenly de-railed and seems a bit crazy, or you've been 'seeing things', you could be going through what Stanislaw Grof calls spiritual emergency or crisis, a condition where a person begins having strong and often very uncomfortable experiences that can resemble mental illness, but are actually part of an often painful process of spiritual awakening.
Or it could be the raging of suppressed or ignored Creativity trying to force its way out.
Years ago, I went through a few years of intense spiritual and creative experiences during which I alternately wrote, drew and painted as if life depended on it (I thought it did), and just as suddenly, dropped into periods of dark despair in which I was hypercritical of my work, sometimes burning it furiously in back yard or kitchen-sink fires. Had I sought medical help (which I didn't), I would probably have been diagnosed with a mood disorder of some kind, perhaps bipolar disorder, a fashionable psychological diagnosis in those days. I even considered the possibility myself. Instead, determined to restore some calm and order to my life, I resolutely turned those raging creative energies to study, trying to understand my mind and bring it to order.
Researchers tell us that bipolar disorder is sometimes linked to creativity, not always but often enough be noticed. It’s not that creativity and bipolar disorder are necessarily connected, psychiatrist Kay Jamison explains, but that “artists and writers, especially poets, suffered disproportionately from depressive illnesses .....Studies of artists and writers ..... show a very much elevated rate, particularly bipolar illness, but of depressive illness in general. Likewise, the studies that have looked at suicide rates in artists and writers find a very much elevated rate of suicide” (Jamison, the ‘Music and the Brain’ symposium).
Virginia Woolf - one of many highly creative individuals whose mental anguish ended with suicide.
However, despite long periods alternating between manic heights and really deep depressions, I am not bipolar. It was a difficult time of my life, and with an Aries sun and a Virgo moon and ascendant, I can be quite conflicted. If I were bipolar, I probably would be still; research shows that the condition worsens over time. After four year of that wild ride and much inner work, my Deep Chaos came to an end.
Bipolar illness
According to the American mental health industry, bipolar disroder affects an unbelievable number of children. Every temperamental, moody or restless child who won’t sit still in school seems to be diagnosed with the illness these days and prescribed drugs, which says a great deal more about the mental health industry than it does about American children.
For some people, though, much fewer than are labelled bipolar, this is a very real mental illness defined primarily by uncontrollable wild mood changes typically oscillating between periods of severe mania and periods of depression. Mood disorders like bipolar are considered to be genetic illnesses; they run in families. Typically, the age of onset is about eighteen years, and might be preceded by depression; if not treated, the illness becomes more severe over time (Jamison). Of the “young adults ... 18 to 25, who get hospitalized for depression”, says professor of psychiatry, Terence Ketter, “40 percent of them in ten years will have a bipolar diagnosis” (‘Mind and Music’ seminar).
Although many creative people suffering from these intense mood swings refuse to seek medical help or accept treatment for fear it will affect their creativity, “three-quarters of the artists and writers say they are as productive or more productive on medication” (Jamison).
A creative personality?
Is there a the connection between high creativity and individual psychology? Probably.
Through clinical and neuroimaging studies, psychiatrist Terrence Ketter and colleagues found that subjects with bipolar disorder and creative controls scored higher than unipolar and healthy controls on neuroticism (negative emotions), cyclothemia (moodiness), intuitive thinking, and openness to experience (‘Mind and Music’). Neuroscientist Peter Whybrow’s research team identified the core of creativity as emotion, since it is through emotion that we are connected to the world; around this emotional core are three key elements: a novelty generator, memory, and “response inhibition” or “cognitive control”, which have some genetic basis (‘Mind and Music).
While “mental illness is not equivalent with creativity..... [it] can sometimes change the nature of the creativity”, affecting not only productivity, but also the way that creativity is expressed. Take Van Gogh, for instance. In his 'quiet' periods, he was actually a methodical and precise painter, and planned his paintings carefully. But “during his hyper-manic episodes it seems as if he just painted directly onto the canvass, he didn't plan anything ..... [there was a] shift in the nature of his art based upon the expression of his illness” (Whybrow, ‘Mind and Music).
Left: self-portrait after Van Gogh's release from hospital where he was medicated
Right: self-portrait in a state of increasing mental distress ...
This doesn't explain why mood disorders are related to creativity in some individuals but not in others. However, brain scientist, Nancy Andreasen, is one of many who note that “a surprisingly large number of personality traits are shared” by highly creative people (2006), giving rise to speculations about the creative personality. But correlation is not causation.
“We don’t really have very sound evidence, let alone proof” of a creative personality type, writes psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1996). Nevertheless, in his “ten dimensions of complexity” Csikszentmihalyi notes that highly creative people are more likely to have certain traits than less creative people, or to exhibit those traits to a larger degree. For instance,
They tend to be more psychologically complex
They “contain contradictory extremes - instead of being an ‘individual’, each of them is a ‘multitude’”
They tend to be more aware of and sensitive to human struggle and suffering.
Lincoln is believed to have suffered from manic-depressive disorder which developed (understandably) into severe depression.
Riding the waves
For some individuals, there appears to be a causal link between mood disorders and creative productivity. A creative person with bipolar disorder, might, like Van Gogh or the composer Mendelsson, experience high productivity in periods of hypomania or sadness, but be incapacitated at either extreme, in periods of severe mania or depression. In the exuberance of “classic or euphoric mania”, a creative person with bipolar might experience a “flight of ideas ..... a kind of a leap-frogging effect of going from one concept to another concept to another sort of tangentially related” (Jamison, ‘Mind and Music’). Sounds good ...
“But left untreated”, adds Ketter, “.....with no additional intervention, two-thirds of people with bipolar one disorder who are hypo-manic within a month will become mania, manic. And it literally is too much of good thing” (‘Mind and Music’).
What is 'normal'?
Which brings me back to my own experience. Psychologist Stanislaw Groff (1900) has found that contrary to "the prevailing attitude in traditional psychiatry and among the general public ... that any deviations from the ordinary perception and understanding of reality are pathological," mood swings, alternating periods of mania and depression, of high and no productivity might instead result from complexities and pressures of creativity and/or spirituality, both of which can manifest in ways that resemble mental illness.
“Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire ...... it involves the ability to move from one extreme to the other as the occasion requires” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996).
But this ability of creative people to ride the waves does not come easy, as poet Rainer Maria Rilke observes. “This sudden shifting of all one’s forces, these about-faces of the soul, never occur without many a crisis” (Rilke, 1997). Creative processes can raise us to the sublime, and/or take us into deep and frank engagement with our own shadow, both of which can be extremely disorienting and disturbing.
Similar struggles and suffering can arise from spiritual crisis when the unprepared psyche is unexpectedly overwhelmed by unusual experiences and sensations as part of spiritual transformation. Gopi Krishna, who wrote extensively about his traumatic kundalini experiences, explains that heightened kundalini activity can cause both “horrible depression, frenzied excitement .....[and] elevated blissful periods, visionary experiences, or creative moods” (1967).
These immense fluctuations of mood and creativity could indicate genuine mental illness in some individuals, but in others, they can be symptoms of spiritual crisis, or effects of a person’s creativity, part and parcel of the creative energy that rises and falls in great waves.
Or both, for as the great psychic Edgar Cayce said, “the Spirit is in the image of the Creative Forces” (reading 391-4). Like creativity, spiritual crisis - even commitment to the spiritual path - can involve huge fluctuations of emotion, from the heights of ecstasy to a ‘dark night of the soul’.
So there it is. The wild fluctuations and mood swings of your creative partner could indicate mental illness - or not. That fickle, changeable, erratic, sometimes tortured, sometimes ecstatic creative personality might be suffering from bipolar disorder, or might be doing what artists often do: pushing at the boundaries of ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’ because their sensory gates are sometimes wide open and the world comes flooding in, with all of its wonder, all of its pain and joy and emotion, providing material from which the artist can draw the stuff of future works.
There is a kind of madness in it, the madness of the soul tossed between heaven and hell till it comes to a still place in between where it can receive inspiration, and create. Yet if we take away that madness, which is what psychiatrists mostly do with medication, if we calm it down to ‘normal’, maybe for some artists and writers, the world will just seem flatter, not worth the enormous energy and hard work of creation.
------------ ‘Music and the Brain: Depression and Creativity Symposium.’ Library of Congress. Class reading. Accessed online on 12/11/14 at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4UJhPiBE6c
Andreasen, N. C. (2006). The creative brain: The science of genius. New York, N.Y.: Plume.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity. New York: Harper Perennial.
Grof, C; Grof, S. (1990). The Stormy Search for Self. New York: Penguin.
Krishna, Gopi. (1967). Living with Kundalini.
Rilke, R. M. (1997). ‘Letter to Merline’ in Creators on Creating. Barron, Montuori, Barron (Eds). New York.: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.
Comments