The Ancient Greeks as well as Shakespeare were among the first to raise the prospect that creativity often borders on insanity. The notion of the tormented artist has been a undying adage. As it usually goes, creativity is often fuelled by the internal demons an artists wrestles in their darkest hours. Historically there have been numerous brilliant and creative individuals who also struggled with what we would call mental illness. A recent study claims this relationship may be well founded, and actually written into our very own DNA.
A new study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience has discovered a genetic link between creativity and mental illness. In this study, genetic and medical information from approximately 85,000 people were examined to find genetic variants that increased one’s risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Researchers then looked at how common these variants were in creative individuals belonging to national artistic societies—actors, dancers, musicians, writers, and visual artists. The results indicated that genetic risk scores for both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia were significantly higher in those defined as creative individuals. More specifically, members of national art societies were 25% more likely to carry these mental disorder variants. The researchers confirmed their findings when examining a separate large medical database held in the Netherlands and Sweden.
A researcher from this study commented, “these findings suggest that creative people may have a genetic predisposition towards thinking differently which, when combined with other harmful biological and environmental factors, could lead to mental illness”. Numerous other studies have endorsed the notion of the mentally afflicted creative. A 2010 study administered intelligence tests to 700,000 Swedish 16-year-olds and then interviewed them 10 years later to ascertain how many had developed a mental disorder. The results revealed that people who excelled on the original evaluation were four times more likely to go on to develop bipolar disorder.
Another interesting connection is the relation between ADHD and creativity. A tremendous amount of evidence indicates that the characteristics of ADHD are in fact associated with creative abilities. Further, recent research in cognitive neuroscience has revealed that both creative thinkers and those diagnosed with ADHD show difficulty suppressing brain activity that comes from the “Imagination Network”. This connection may lend support to the growing idea that many mental disorders reflect extremes of the normal spectrum of human behavior, rather than distinct psychiatric illness.
There are of course skeptics of the often romanticized connection between mental illness and creativity. Albert Rothenberg, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University is not convinced of this connection. He interviewed 45 science Nobel laureates about their creative strategies and found no evidence of mental illness in any of them. Nevertheless, this new discovery of a possible genetic link is novel because it relies on the use of objective research measures. It will be interesting to see what future studies further confirm or deny the overlap between the biology of mental illness and creativity.