Creativity and Disorders

[dragon wench]

It seems, to me, that the notion of 'the tortured artist' is so common that it has almost become something of a stereotype.

Equally certain disorders such as Bipolarism, ADHD, Depression and Dyslexia seem to have associations with extreme creativity..

Once while in Lausanne, Switzerland, I visited an art gallery dedicated to the art of prisoners and those who had been locked in mental institutions... It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life...

Do you think the above claims have any validity? And, if so, why do you think various emotional/chemical disorders should affect human creativity?

[C Elegans]

It's been demonstrated clearly that there is no overrepresenation of disorders among creative people. The tortured artist is a mere stereotype.

[Magrus]

I believe it has more to do with the fact those who are "outside" the "norm" have experienced things others have not, will not, and cannot experience. They view the world around them in a different light, creating things that appear amazing, disturbing, new, surprising, etc to those "inside" the "norm".

[ik911]

Or those tortured people become great rap or blues artists...

Do we like them because we can identify with them or their work, or because we find them or their work extraordinary or strange? Or is it perhaps because they put more life in their works? More emotion or passion, fueled by anger or by a desire to create an anti-reality in their works.

[Luis Antonio]

Originally Posted by C Elegans

It's been demonstrated clearly that there is no overrepresenation of disorders among creative people. The tortured artist is a mere stereotype.

Still, its a nice, romantic way to see things, despite the fact that its proven.

Anyhoo, proving something is about collecting data and making this data prove you're right among many scientific circles, so I wont take that for the ending word of it.

I think the torture of life may bring these people a new way to look into life that puzzles us in front of art, in front of texts written by those people, and when we see that pain, that amazing thing written almost in blood it marks ourselves. I dont know wheter the authors of, for example, 1984 (bless Orwell) were tortured by the possibility of the total state control, or if Werther (Ghoethe) was tortured too, or if Dostoyeveski was a lunatic rambling insane things when he wrote Crime and Punishment, despite the fact that I like to think those authors must have become either highly involved with those themes to do that or they must have had those feelings they describe.

[dragon wench]

I don't really have any position on this one way or the other, it's just something I seem to keep running across, and I thought I'd pose the question here.

However, I woke up at 5:30 this morning again (it's 7:30 now)...
So I decided to use the time to scan around Google. My impression is that it is actually a question of some debate amongst psychiatrists and others who study mental illness, even still.

I will post some of my findings later on

*wanders off to make coffee*

[Magrus]

Meh, getting into the scientific aspect of it, a lot of things commonly "known" are "theories". Mental illness being one of those things that leans heavily on "theories", and more on "I suppose..." than on facts. You cannot measure someone's sanity like you can the height of someone.

Being "creative" is a broad thing as well. I am assuming you are meaning the more "wild" and "out there" types of artistic creativity? Many people who would be considered "unbalanced" by the majority of their peers draw/write things that make those same peers uncomfortable. On the other hand, many draw/write things that intrigue those same peers.

I have been in witness of a 40-something man who still doodled bunnies and flowers in the hospital. He had and extreme case of paranoid schitzophrenia, and for him, drawing what he wished he was seeing was an escape. On the flip side, many schitzophrenics write and draw exactly what they see, which is often times in moments of extreme stress, frustration, anxiety and it ends up to be dark, frightening or surreal. To them, it is their reality. This is their daily life, what they experience, hallucinations or not.

[Hill-Shatar]

Do you think the above claims have any validity? And, if so, why do you think various emotional/chemical disorders should affect human creativity?

My brother is Autistic. Frankly, he's no more creative then the rest of us, but rather, just thinks slightly differently when it comes to key moments of... 'creation'. I've seen equally wonderful works from both sides.

One thing that has set Autistic people aside from others is that they seem to be less social and agitated when others come near them that they do not know will come every day. Too often this has been viewed that the artist is stressed with life, when really, it was just stressed from the visitor.

My brother became fairly social in early high school, and now, hell, he works in the tourist industry, amusing people with an incredibly dry sense of humour. Some people simply try to see something wrong with a person with Autism -- they mention to the guests just before they leave that one of their hosts was Autistic, and they could never figure out that is was him they were talking about. Otherwise, people they have told before look for problems every chance they get.

The type of art my brother is closest to is music. He once held up screaming metal to my ear, and then soothing rock (well, in a sense) and said that the bass in these two songs were remarkable. Perhaps they just focus more on one thing then another, or think differently -- this does not mean that they are creative. This just means they are skilled, like hundreds of other artists alive today.

[dragon wench]

Here is some of the stuff I found. Since I don't want to post quotes without their context this early in the discussion, I'm posting links to full articles. Some are quite long, others are from papers like "Science Daily," and are a synopsis referencing particular studies.

I used the search criteria "Creativity+Mental Disorder," which resulted in an overwhelming number of articles suggesting that there is a connection between the two. I'm thinking different search terms would likely yield different results. Either that, or the more romantic approach still attracts a lot of attention.

Biological Basis For Creativity Linked To Mental Illness
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1001061055.htm

Some dialogue from Pub Med can be found in these two links

‘Kind of Blue’: creativity, mental disorder and jazz
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/183/3/193
Creativity, mental disorder and jazz
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/184/2/185

Weird behavior, creativity linked
http://www.world-science.net/otherne...6_weirdfrm.htm

This piece below rejects the conclusion that there is a link between the two
BEHAVIOR
Moods and the muse
A new study reappraises the link between creativity and mental illness
http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_edpik/b_2.htm

There is more.. I found about 40 pages worth of stuff, but I'll stick with that for now.

And if anyone is interested, here is a linkto the art gallery I visited:
http://tinyurl.com/ocpf4

[C Elegans]

Originally Posted by Luis Antonio

Still, its a nice, romantic way to see things, despite the fact that its proven.

Anyhoo, proving something is about collecting data and making this data prove you're right among many scientific circles, so I wont take that for the ending word of it.

During the 1960's and 1970's, it was very popular to conduct studies of creativity. The so called "anti-psychiatry" school of psychiatry, which proposed that psychiatric disorder did not exist per se, but was merely a healthy response to a sick society, also reinforced the age-old stereotype that people with psychiatric disorders were more "artistic" or insightful that other people. Several studies were conducted, either by taking artistic people and screen them for diagnosis, or the other way around, by taking people with a diagnosis and letting them undergo tests of creativity or letting them produce material that was assessed by professional artists or art critics. None of these studies showed any relationship between neuropsychiatric diagnosis and artistic skill. The only diagnosis that has been positively correlated to creativity is synesthisia, it is overrepresented in people with creative jobs, as is left-handedness. (Left-handedness btw is also overrepresented among criminal offenders).

Now, before making a connection between creativity and neuropsychiatric disorder, I think we should start with considering how common is neuropsychiatric disorder? Here is the approximate prevalence (how many people have this disorder right now in the population) for some commonly known diagnosis:

Schizophrenia 1%
Bipolar disorder 1.5%
Major depression 5-5.5%%
Obsessive-compulsive disorder 2.5%
Generalised anxiety disorder 3%
Panic disorder 1.5%
Borderline personality disorder 1.5-2%
ADHD 3-4% (in some studies 6-7%, probably because ADD is also included)
Autism-Asperger 1.5%

Now, some of these individuals are the same since multiple diagnosis are common for some disorders. Many people who fulfil the criteria for ADHD also fulfil the critera for Asperger's, for instance. However, there are also many relatively common diagnosis witch I haven't listed, such as Tourette's, cyclothymic psychosis, delusional disorder, etc. Thus, it is a conservative estimation to state that about 20% of the population fulfil the critera for a neuropsychiatric condition or disorder. Some of these diagnosis are life long, a more temporary state like for instance Major Depressive disorder, is as common as life-time prevalence 1:3, ie 1 in 3 people will get MDD at some point in their life.

So, our first question must be: is neuropsychiatric diagnosis more common than let's say 20% of all artists? According to studies, the answer is no. Even controlling for general IQ-level, people with a diagnosis are underrepresented in arts.
So why then do people have this idea that many famous artists have been "mentally ill"? One reason may be that in the history of arts, the unhappiness and suicides of famous people like Virginia Woolf or Piotr Tchaikovsky has been noted and recieved a lot of attention, whereas the unhappiness and suicides or millions of British and Russian peasants and industry workers have not. Another reason may be that "normal" people, even health care professionals, has a tendency to overestimate the quality of the work produced by "ill" or "disabled" patients. This is probably due to an unconscious bias that we expect less from people with a diagnosis, and this is part of our prejudice systems against people with neuropsychiatric disorder. This hypothesis has been tested, and it was shown that work that patient's word that had been judged as artistic and skilled by t he patients' psychologists and psychiatrists, was not rated as having high quality when art critics rated the work blindly, ie without knowing it was produced by patients. One example of this which you can read about, is from famous neurologists Oliver Sachs, who published sketches and paintings made by one of his patients. Sachs was overwhelmed by the genious of his patients, but later, arts critics have assessed the work as rather average.

Personally, I view the idea that people with neuropsychiatric disorders are more "creative" than other people as an elongation of the general difficulty people have to realise that "crazy" people are not more like each other than "normal" people. In society in general, there is a tendency to believe that people with ADHD are more like each other than "normal" people are like each other. This is completely incorrect. It's just part of a prejudice system. Two people with schizophrenia are no more like each other than two people without schizophrenia. Sure the two people with schizophrenia may have something in common, like they may both have auditative hallucinations. But two "normal" people may also have some things in common, like you and I may both like to read books, or we may both eat 3 times a day.

Over the years, I have grew very tired of the popular images of people with neuropsychiatric diagnosis. The genious geek with Asperger, the energic and social ADHD:er, the mystic, artistic bipolar...In my opinion, it is just hurtful for the patients to be depicted in such stereotypes.

[dragon wench]

Here is a piece that is probably short enough to post in full. It is a synopsis, but the work it cites appears to date to around 2004, so relatively recent. Anyway, it seems to provide a reasonable overview for the layperson.


http://www.patienthealthinternationa...ures/3118.aspx


27 September 2004

The mad genius – fact or fiction?

That fine madness
“Men have called me mad,” wrote the 19th century poet Edgar Allen Poe, “but the question is not yet settled whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought, from moods of mind exalted at the expenses of the general intellect.”

Poe’s feeling that genius and insanity are linked is supported by a wealth of anecdotal evidence. Many prominent artists have written accounts of their moods that describe bouts of depression followed by periods of elation, consistent with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. It has been claimed that 50% of poets, 38% of musicians, 20% of painters, and many others in creative fields have bipolar disorder. By contrast, the condition affects just 1% of the population at large.

High-profile evidence
Recent high-profile evidence comes from Kay Jamison from Johns Hopkins University in Boston, MA. Jamison, a professor of psychiatry who is herself afflicted by bipolar disorder, found that both bipolar disorder and its milder form, cyclothymia, were significantly more common among British writers and artists than they were in the general population. Nancy Andreasen, another proponent of the link between creativity and bipolar illness, found that creative writers were far more likely to suffer from mental illness, primarily bipolar disorder, than their counterparts in other occupations. Andreason, a psychiatrist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA, also found that the writers’ first-degree relatives were more likely to be creative and suffer from a mood disorder, suggesting a genetic – and therefore heritable – basis for the disease.

Enhanced cognitive function
In people with bipolar disorder, the manic and hypomanic phases are diagnosed on the basis of various symptoms, including flight of ideas, lowering of inhibitions, and heightened creativity, sensitivity, and productivity. The potential of such attributes to enhance artistic creativity is self-evident. Furthermore, mania is characterized by improvements in memory and cognition that may also boost creativity. Clinical studies show that individuals in a manic state tend to rhyme and use alliteration more, and can find more synonyms and word-associate more quickly than those without bipolar disorder. The enhanced cognitive state of mania may thus contribute to a fluency of ideas that is essential to innovation.

Highs and lows
Another theory is that experiencing cycles of depression and mania facilitates the development of artistic insight by allowing sufferers to experience extreme emotional lows and highs. This is illustrated by a quote from Professor Jamison, who wrote: “I honestly believe that as a result of [my illness] I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and have been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; appreciated more the springs, for all the winters... Depressed, I have crawled on my hands and knees in order to get across a room and have done it for month after month. But normal or manic I have run faster, thought faster, and loved faster than most I know.”

Link remains unproven
Critics of the notion that bipolar disorder increases creativity stress that the link, though widely accepted, is only theoretical: A causal connection has never been proven. Furthermore, the biological mechanisms underlying such a link remains speculative and researchers are far from unified in suggesting a pathway that explains why creativity and bipolar disorder might tend to coexist. An obvious argument against a link is that most people with bipolar disorder are not creative or artistic, while most artists and creative individuals are not affected by bipolar disorder. Therefore, the relationship, if one exists, is complex and influenced by a number of as-yet unidentified factors.

Methodological flaws
There are methodological flaws in many studies examining mental illness in famous historical figures. For instance, medical diagnoses based purely on biographical descriptions are unreliable, meaning that estimates of the prevalence of bipolar disorder among these figures should be interpreted with caution. It is also possible that studies based on biographical sources are subject to significant bias. For example, we tend to know far more about the private lives of famous individuals than about members of the general public, who might therefore be more able to hide such afflictions, in order to avoid social stigma.

Many sources of bias
Although Professor Jamison used systematic methods to eliminate this sort of bias, her studies have been criticised for focusing on people who have become “socially defined” as creative – for example, by winning prizes. Lesser-known artists and writers, who are in the majority, may not have been included in the research as nothing is known about their private lives and mental health. The samples of artists included in studies such as Professor Jamison’s may therefore be unrepresentative. Moreover, eminent artists may refuse to participate in such research for fear of stigmatization, skewing the analysis yet further.

No biological basis?
Others have questioned the physiological mechanisms by which bipolar disorder might enhance creativity, arguing that certain traits widespread among creative people – eccentricity, uneasiness, propensity to excess, and experimentation – could be a reflection not of an underlying mental illness but of the tolerance by society of the behavior of high-achieving individuals. In other words, their success allows them to behave in ways that would not be tolerated in a member of the general public. Another theory is that the dramatic mood swings experienced by people with bipolar disorder make them unsuited to structured occupations such as business or science. These individuals are thus drawn to more creative pursuits as they are more accommodating for those who are emotionally unstable.

Mental wellness, not illness
If there is indeed a link between mental illness and creativity, it may not be limited to bipolar disorder. Instead, a state of general unease or tension may be conducive to artistic achievement. This is supported by evidence that many famous writers tend to be most productive during the stable periods between manic or depressive episodes. Other studies suggest that creative abilities tend to be most likely in people with mild forms of the disease. On the flip side, Harvard psychiatrist Albert Rothenburg argues that it is mental health rather than illness that facilitates creativity, noting that creative individuals in a range of professions are characterised by emotional stability.

Society versus the individual
Even if a link between bipolar disorder and creativity is proven, it may be relevant in only a minority of individuals. Some fear that romanticising such a serious medical condition is dangerous, placing a burden on sufferers to be creative or even to refuse treatment. So, although society as a whole benefits from its so-called “mad geniuses”, this must be balanced against the cost to the individual – at least one in five sufferers attempt suicide. Bipolar disorder is now a treatable condition and most patients report that their quality of life improves after starting medication.

Famous creatives believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder:

Writers:
Hans Christian Andersen
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
Charles Dickens
Mary Shelley
Virginia Woolf
Honore de Balzac

Composers:
Hector Berlioz
George Frederic Handel
Gustav Mahler
Sergey Rachmaninoff
Robert Schumann
Irving Berlin
Peter Tchaikovsky
Ludwig van Beethoven

Poets:

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
William Blake
Emily Dickinson
T. S. Eliot
Victor Hugo
John Keats
Edgar Allen Poe

Artists:
Paul Gaugin
Vincent van Gogh
Michelangelo
Adolphe Monticelli
Georgia O’Keefe
Jackson Pollock



References:

For the sake of word count I excluded the references, but they can be found at the bottom of the link I posted above.

[C Elegans]

Originally Posted by dragon wench

I used the search criteria "Creativity+Mental Disorder," which resulted in an overwhelming number of articles suggesting that there is a connection between the two.

I found 798 hits in Pubmed. That is not much. Nobody believe there is a relationship between cancer and intelligence, still cancer + intelligence resulted in 1215 hits As you pointed out, we cannot know whether the search engine results reflect a real connection, an erranous image or simply an interest among researches to investigate this question.

However, I looked at your links:

Biological Basis For Creativity Linked To Mental Illness
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1001061055.htm

Sorry, but this popular article in Science daily, is completely unserious and highly speculative. Whether the journalists or the authors of the paper are to blame, I don't know. Latent inhibition (LI) is an animal model used in experimental research. It means that when you expose an animal or a person to a stimulus without a consequence, this retards a learning of subsequent conditioned associations with that stimulus compared to if you had no pre-exposure. LI has been related to the dopamine release in nucleaus accumbens in rats. LI has also been vaguely related to various neurospsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, other psychosis disorders, Obsessive-compulsive disorder etc. There are no consistent findings however.

Carson et al report that in individuals with high creativity, high IQ and high working memory, LI was 7 times more common than in the individuals with low creativity. Fine, LI may be related to creativity. LI may also be related to disorder. But that does not necessarily mean creativity and disorder are related.

Let's compare LI to left-handedness. Left-handedness is overrepresented in creative professions, especially such occupations that demant visuspatial skills like architects and designers. Left-handedness is also overrepresented among criminal offenders. But criminal offense and creative profession is not related. It is not the same individuals who are left handed and creative, and left handed an criminal, it's two different groups of left-handed people. (Also remember that they are minority groups, most left-handed people are neither criminal nor have creative jobs).
It is known that left-handedness can be due to genetic factors, or due to biological but not genetic factors. The inherited form of left-handedness is associated with differences in brain lateralisation. Normal right-handed people have their fine hand motor functions lateralised to the left hemisphere of the brain, and they also have language function more in the left hemisphere and spatial function more in the right hemisphere. People with familial left-handedness have these functions more spread over both hemispheres. People with non-familiar left-handedness have the same distribution over the hemispheres as right-handed people, it's just "mirrored". This is probably due to minor damage to the brain during pregnancy or birth. Non-familiar left-handedness is associated with ischemica (lack of oxygen) during birth. It is the non-familiar type that is overrepresented in criminal offenders. The explanation for this is that the minor brain damage that is caused by the ischemia, causes both the left-handedness and the other problems (impulsive control problems, learning problems, attention problems etc) that make the individual more prone to become a criminal. So simplified, we can say that minor brain-damage during birth leads to an increased risk for re-organisation of certain brain-functions (ie handedness) which in turn can lead to either higher "risk" for good visuspatial functions, or higher risk for problems that lead to development of criminal behaviour. Which of the two alternatives you take, is depending on other factors like social conditions, other skills or disabilities and personality factors.

Let's assume that LI, like handedness, has a biological, maybe even genetic cause. Let's further assume that LI is a marker for both neuropsychiatric disorder and creativity. The study by Carson et al suggests that creative people with high IQ and good working memory skills more often has LI, not that patients with disorder are more creative. The result of the study can be interpreted the same way as left-handedness: maybe LI is something that can lead either to higher risk for disorder, or higher "risk" for creativeness. Or maybe it is just a chance finding. They used a small sample, and the study was not published in a very good journal.

‘Kind of Blue’: creativity, mental disorder and jazz
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/183/3/193

This editorial brings up many of the problems with the field, but I disagree that prospective studies of creativity and psychiatric disorder are difficult to conduct - at least, not more difficult that they always are. On the contrary, prospective studies is the way to go to establish with security whether something is related or not, and what way the causality chain goes.

Creativity, mental disorder and jazz
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/184/2/185

This is just a letter where the author defends a study that was commented on in the editorial above.

Weird behavior, creativity linked
http://www.world-science.net/otherne...6_weirdfrm.htm

This bad popular article reports the conclusions from a serious and interesting study by Folley & Park. Folley & Park found that individuals with schizotypal PD (STPD) scored higher on a creativity test than normal control subjects (NC) and patients with schizophrenia (S). However, there are some problems with this study. First, 17 subjects is a very small sample for this kind of measurements. There is a high risk for sample biases. Second, the schizotypal group was a lot younger than the other two groups - normals had an average age of 35.2 years, schizophrenics of 39.5 years but schizotypal PD:s were only 22.8. Furthermore, the authors write that there was no statistically significant difference in general IQ between the groups, but even if it was not statistically significant, the STPD:s scored 110 in average, compared to 100 for NC:s and S:s. The STPD:s also scored higher on verbal fluency tests. So it is not really beyond doubt here that the three groups are comparable. The STPD:s may score higher in the creativity test because they are younger and have higher IQ and better verbal skills, not because they have STPD. (The creativity test was a verbal test, btw, so verbal fluency is not unimportant.)

I don't mean to say that it's completely impossible that creativity and neuropsychiatric disorder are related in some way, but there is no robust evidence that they are, there is only a strong and persistent stereotype that has not been confirmed in studies. It is very similar to many other popular stereotypes: they are real only in people's minds, but not in the empiric, objective sense.

If, in the future, a relationship will be discovered, I bet my arms and legs that this "relationship" will be similar to the left-handedness thing. We humans have about 25000-30000 base pairs. It's quite a small genome. Considerably smaller than for instance a garlic. Of these relatively few genes, we share about 60% with yeast, 80% with a rat and 97% with a chimp. Many genes have the same function across species, but some have different functions. For example, one gene that cause a severe skin disease in humans, cause only minor and completely undangerous loss of tail and pawn fur in rats. In the future, I am sure we will discover many relationships between certain genes, certain biological features and behaviours. Maybe creativeness and bipolar disorder share a common, genetic background. Maybe blue eyes and poor auditive short-term memory share a common genetic background. Who knows - but to me the question is not very interesting since the limited number of genes and limited number of biological mechanisms will always result in a lot of "common backgrounds" for all sorts of human behaviour. The challenge, in my opinion, is not to find a common background (although a lot of such information will be found on the way) but to discover the immensely complex and multifold mechanisms that explain why one individual becomes a musical genious and another a severely disabled patient with treatment resistent schizophrenia.

[Chimaera182]

Now that I can finally see what threads are "happenin'" in SYM again, I can finally post. Shame I'm a tad bit late to some of them. Especially since I started writing this one yesterday morning and my internet tanked on me.

Originally Posted by Magrus

I believe it has more to do with the fact those who are "outside" the "norm" have experienced things others have not, will not, and cannot experience. They view the world around them in a different light, creating things that appear amazing, disturbing, new, surprising, etc to those "inside" the "norm".

I was thinking this when reading DW's original post, so I agree with this. As seems to be mentioned later, it's this "outside the norm" view that is so tantalizing and beautiful to those "inside" the norm. They're so trapped in that little niche, and they get a peek at what happens outside their norm through such artistic expression. I have a friend who's a fan of Salvador Dali; he described one of his paintings to me, and I immediately pictured this awesome sight of a tiger with a fish jumping out of its mouth and a gun jumping out of that (something like that, this talk happened over a year ago), and I thought it sounded so cool and beautiful just by the way I imagined it; when I actually saw it, it was quite the let down... so who was the more creative/insane? I talked to another friend of mine about what he thought of Dali, and he said he was just a big druggie. His work is quite weird in that unconventional, "out of the norm" way, I guess. But I'll bring this up again later...

Originally Posted by Magrus

Meh, getting into the scientific aspect of it, a lot of things commonly "known" are "theories". Mental illness being one of those things that leans heavily on "theories", and more on "I suppose..." than on facts. You cannot measure someone's sanity like you can the height of someone.

Sanity, like "normal," is relative. Hence why you can't measure it, like you say. People sometimes consider behavior outside the norm to be insane; those who don't behave as expected are deficient in their sanity in some way. It doesn't mean they're lacking sanity, it just means they're outside the "norm" of behavior projected onto them. It's hard to judge sanity in cases such as this.

Originally Posted by Hill-Shatar

My brother is Autistic. Frankly, he's no more creative then the rest of us, but rather, just thinks slightly differently when it comes to key moments of... 'creation'. I've seen equally wonderful works from both sides.

We're not suggesting that truly great works of literature/art come from only those "outside the norm" or from those who are lacking in sanity in some way. There are probably countless masterpieces created by those who were considered quite sane. It's like any stereotype, really: not all people of "lesser" sanity will create masterpieces, and not all masterpieces are created by people of "lesser" sanity.

Back to my Dali comment... drugs. Drugs are also a way for people to experience life "outside the norm." I know very little about Dali, so I don't know if my friend's statement about him being a druggie is true or not. But I recall that some people do use drugs in a way to bring out their artistic side. Drugs help people to go "outside" that norm. Should something be said about this as well? (I don't even remember where I was going to go with this yesterday).

[C Elegans]

Salvador Dali was not known to be a drug addict. He never demonstrated any major interest for drugs. Dali said himself that he did not take drugs.

For the quality of this discussion, I think it's very important to differentiate between neuropsychiatric diagnosis/disorder and the popular terms "insane" or "mad". Having a severe neuropsychiatric diagnosis is far from just being "outside of the norm", since many people with a diagnosis suffer from very disabiling impairments of basic functions.

Just as I think it is degrading to believe that people with the same diagnosis or similar symptoms can be lumped together in a group that is supposed to be more homogenous than other groups of people, I also think it is degrading to many severely handicapped, suffering people to lump them together with a Steppenwolf-romantic notion of what is "outside of the norms of society".

[slade]

Originally Posted by dragon wench

Equally certain disorders such as Bipolarism, ADHD, Depression and Dyslexia seem to have associations with extreme creativity..

Dyslexia is a disorder?