The Writer’s Life: Depression and Creative People

It’s scary isn’t it? A famous creative person faces that dark part of him or her self and loses the battle. And the media in its collective hive mind wisdom trots out this line: Celebrity Loses Battle With Depression. It’s such a common media trope it’s just expected we’ll see it. Ugh.

There could be lots of swearing on my part here, but this is supposed to be a g-rated blog. It just makes me angry to see such a glib answer spread across electronic and print news.

Still the question begs to be answered. Are creative people more likely to be depressed than other people?

One Swedish study involving one million people found that as a group, those in the creative professions were no more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders than other people. But there is a big “however” here. Writers, it seems, are at a higher risk of mood disorders, schizophrenia and other forms of psychiatric illness. And this may be due to how creative people process information.

Brain scans reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia.

Both groups lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought.
It could be this uninhibited processing that allows creative people to “think outside the box”, say experts from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.

Rex Jung, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, tells us:

…little is known about what happens in the brain during creative bursts.
“What we can agree on is that the frontal lobes are critically involved in creative processes, both down-regulation during cognitive expansion, and up-regulation during the refinement of ideas,” Jung said. “This back and forth between different networks within the frontal lobes, and between the frontal lobes and other regions of the brain, appear to suggest a complex process drawing upon multiple brain regions and multiple cognitive processes.”

It doesn’t help that many writers tend to be introverts. Our inner lives are so rich, our need for “alone time” so acute, that we may feel that others don’t understand our intense feelings. And we have every reason to feel this way, since our society rewards extrovert rather than introvert behavior.

So it appears that what makes it possible for us to be creative is a double-edged sword. The ability to think more and deeply about many issues subjects the brain to realizations about the permutations of life. This includes projections on how bad things can get which can lead to depression. But does this mean that creative people are walking insurance risks?

Not that there isn’t a long list of creative people who took their lives. There is. We’ve heard of Sylvia Plath, Earnest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and a host of others that despaired of their lives. But living a creative life, aside from brain function, has its own problems:

People who have worked in the field of arts throughout the history have had problems with poverty, persecution, social alienation, psychological trauma, substance abuse, high stress and other such environmental factors which are associated with developing and perhaps causing mental illness. It is thus likely that when creativity itself is associated with positive moods, happiness, and mental health, pursuing a career in the arts may bring problems with stressful environment and income.

But aside from all that, not all creative people are depressed. Depression is not inevitable. There are ways of managing mood disorders. It does not help those in creative professions to cast a mantle of mental fragility on them. Let’s not fall into the trap of spouting easy answers for the complex problems of individuals who live the creative life.

Photo published under a Creative Commons License issued by Flickr user sacks08.