The Association Between Creativity, Addiction And Mental Illness

Creativity and Mental Illness

The association between mental illness (addictions, bipolar, eating
disorder(s), borderline personality disorder, depression, histrionic, schizophrenia
etc…) and creativity first appeared in literature in the 1970s, but the idea of
a link between “madness” and “genius” is much older. Dating
back at least to the Ancient Greeks who believed that creativity came from the
gods, and in particular the Muses, the goddesses of arts and sciences, and the
nine daughters of Zeus, the king of the gods. The idea of a complete work of
art emerging without conscious thought or effort was reinforced by the views of
the Romantic era.

It has been proposed
that there is a particular link between creativity and mental illness, specifically
bipolar disorder, whereas major depressive disorder appears to be significantly
more common among playwrights, novelists, biographers, and artists. Individuals
with Bipolar Disorder II experience milder periods of hypomania during which
the flight of ideas, faster thought processes and ability to take in more
information can be converted to art, writing, poetry or design.

A research team at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm
studied 13 mentally healthy, highly creative men and women. As noted in the published
paper they found that divergent thinking, or the ability to “think outside the
box,” involves the brain’s dopamine communication system. The Swedish research
team used PET scanning to determine the abundance of a particular dopamine
receptor, or sensor, in the creative individuals’ thalamus and striatum, areas
that process and sort information before it reaches conscious thought, and that
are known to be involved in schizophrenia. The team found that people who had
lower levels of dopamine receptor activity in the thalamus also had higher
scores on tests of divergent thinking, for instance, finding many solutions to
a problem.

Previous work has shown that people with schizophrenia also
have lower dopamine receptor activity in the thalamus and the scientists
suggest in their paper that this striking similarity demonstrates a “crucial”
link between creativity and psychopathology. “Thinking outside the box might be
facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box” says author Fredrik Ullén, a
cognitive scientist at Karolinska.