 Layers of fear? Isn't that that game about the painter who slowly slips into madness? Yeah, I'm not crazy about it. Anthony Bourdain's recent loss of his lifelong fight against depression has brought a lot of media focus to the topic of mental health. Around one in five people lives with some sort of mental illness, often managing their symptoms in secret to avoid the social stigma that, for some strange reason, is associated with a condition that is more common than having blonde hair in the U.S. Bourdain's death is perfectly illustrative of that situation, with many of his fans and co-workers shocked that someone who lived such a rich and vibrant life could suffer so much in private. But, as I've noted before, culture is nothing if not annoyingly inconsistent. Along with the fear and demonization of those who have mental health problems, there's an equally pervasive story that being crazy is like having a creative superpower. The trope of the tortured or unhinged creative genius appears in all forms of fiction. Dr. Frankenstein, Willy Wonka, The Phantom of the Opera, the protagonist of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Narell actually gets magic powers by distilling and ingesting madness. In this narrative device, these characters can supposedly see and imagine things that others can't by harnessing divergent thinking. Although usually at some terrible cost. Loneliness, anguish, inability to form meaningful relationships or perform simple tasks. It's a useful narrative device in fiction as a means of balancing a character's superior insight or intellect with some tragic shortcoming that makes them relatable and vulnerable. It's a compelling story, so much so that the madness as genius fuel trope is also invoked when people discuss real individuals who are known or suspected to have had some mental health issues. As we've noted, a fifth of the population has those issues. So we'd absolutely expect some percentage of famous artists and scientists and writers and mathematicians and whoever to exhibit those problems. But many go so far as to attribute the success of noteworthy individuals to their illnesses. More or less exactly the way they're portrayed in fiction. According to this idea, Van Gogh was only a revolutionary impressionist painter because he had depression. Kurt Girdel suffered from paranoid illusions, which was what made him capable of his monumental discoveries in mathematics. Newton could only invent calculus and discover modern physics because he had a constellation of severe mental issues, including bipolar disorder, the same illness that supposedly fueled Schumann, Hemingway, Beethoven, and a score of other artists and composers. Byron himself once said, While that's certainly a charming way of phrasing it, it seems a little suspicious. The idea that being touched can help someone be more creative is an empirical claim, something that can be confirmed or refuted with evidence. Some people feel uncomfortable about using science on the creative process, as though looking too closely might somehow disrupt whatever magic gives us art and music. But if mental illness is legitimately helpful to those in creative disciplines, that would be useful to know, as would the opposite. Some creative individuals who have inconvenient or even life-threatening mental health problems will actually avoid seeking treatment, either therapy or medication, fearing that becoming well-adjusted and content will extinguish their precious spark of creativity. There have been various findings on the subject over several decades, but the biggest and most complete study was actually published fairly recently, in 2013, by a team of Swedish researchers, titled Mental Illness, Suicide, and Creativity, 40-Year Perspective Total Population Study. OK, so the title isn't exactly poetry, but the paper itself is quite beautiful. The researchers examined Swedish government census data and hospital records, identifying just about anyone in the past 40 years who reported being employed in a creative discipline. Some of them might go on to become legendary, most probably wouldn't, but all of them reported working in an occupation that demanded some sort of creative talent. This gave the scientists a much larger data set than any other study on creativity had ever used, one with over a million people in it. Let's cover some of the more interesting findings and then talk a little about what they might mean. This is a plot of odds ratios for the likelihood of having a creative profession, given that the person in question has some mental disorder. That is, compared to the average person, how likely is it that your job requires some sort of creative ability if you have this disorder? An odds ratio of, say, 1.5 would mean that the people who had that disease were 50% more likely to be engaged in some sort of creative occupation, compared to people who don't have the disease, which we'd probably expect if mental illness facilitated some sort of creativity. But most of the values in this graph aren't anywhere close to that. In fact, most of them are below 1, meaning that individuals holding creative professions had a significantly reduced likelihood of being diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, unipolar depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, ADHD, or of committing suicide. That's unexpected. What's weirder is what happened when the researchers expanded their analysis to close genetic relatives. This is the same sort of graph, and you can see the results for straight-up diagnosis at the top. It turns out that if you had a parent that had been diagnosed, you were one and a half times more likely to be a creative professional. If you had a sibling with schizophrenia, you were 26% more likely to earn a living doing something creative. We see similar patterns in all the other effective disorders, including depression, bipolar, and schizoaffective disorder. That's also unexpected. These graphs represent all the data for anyone who the authors felt depended on creativity to be successful in their occupation, which was a pretty diverse set of occupations, including a few that we might not normally think of as requiring creativity, like scientists. But across the board, accepting authors, every other kind of creative professional had lower or nearly equal odds of being diagnosed with one of these disorders. Professional dancers, musicians, scientists, sculptors, painters, composers, interior decorators. Kiaga and Friends report that if someone has a mental disorder, they're less likely to be working in those fields, and that people who work in those fields are less likely to have them. Okay, so how are we supposed to interpret these data points? Well, the researchers suggest that there might be an inverted you relationship between mental divergence and creative productivity. It might be that having some slightly atypical mental processes may grant someone an increased ability to find relationships that most people wouldn't find, up to a point, but beyond that they become counterproductive to the creative process. That makes some intuitive sense. If you're exhausting all your mental energy fighting crippling depression or anxiety or whatever, you're not going to have a lot left to make quality art. Furthermore, the idea of a band of productively atypical psychology agrees well with some of the data regarding the mental health of close family members. Having a parent or a sibling with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder does increase someone's risk of being diagnosed with those disorders. But apparently, for successful creators, it's very rarely a severe enough symptomology to warrant diagnosis or treatment. Maybe they're just a little bit off of normal and don't have to wrestle with the disorder the way their family does. But what about those authors I mentioned? The Keyaga study highlights a very robust finding that people who describe themselves as professional authors are substantially more likely to have one of the psychopathology cited here. Writers were one and a half times more likely to be alcoholics or abuse drugs, twice as likely to suffer from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. How does that square with this idea of a useful band of atypical thought? The researchers note another possibility that might also make sense here. Maybe we've just got the causation backwards. They suggest that if you're someone who has difficulties with mental health, it might be more of a challenge to hold down a run-of-the-mill 9-to-5 job. In contrast, writing can be a more solitary discipline with more wiggle room to work odd hours or accommodate a peculiar working environment if necessary. Maybe that makes it especially attractive to those with some sort of psychopathology. There's also a less flattering explanation. Most people understand that it takes a lot of diligent practice and training to be remotely passable in most creative professions. But many believe that writing professionally is a piece of cake. After all, you write things all the time. How hard could it be? Combine that dismissive attitude with the difficulties of finding employment under the effects of severe mental illness and you might have a recipe for something like, oh, what do I do? You know, I'm a writer. It's pretty clear from this data that it's entirely possible to be a successful artist without being, as Byron put it, touched. It seems that most people who can hold down jobs in creative fields are actually less likely to have some sort of mental illness than the rest of us. If they have any sort of atypical psychology, it's usually not severe enough to warrant a diagnosis. Or if it is, working in a creative field might just be a convenient way for them to cope with the difficulties that come with it. It's a little heartbreaking to think that some artists might refuse to even consider getting help for their struggles with mental illness because they're afraid they'll lose something essential for making good art. Because that trope of the tortured artist has been around since Aristotle and has many people convinced that being totally unhinged is a prerequisite for creative genius. Of course, that legend arose before J.S. Bach and William Shakespeare. Two individuals with no notable psychological issues who did pretty well for themselves. What do you think of the madness as genius fuel narrative? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share and don't stop thunking.