Bipolar link to creativity

Tuesday November 1st, 2011

Mozart's manic compositions typify the link that many people think exists between mental illness and creativity.

Now a major new study suggests there is indeed a strong link between bipolar disorder - formerly known as manic depression - and creativity.

The Swedish researchers found a link only with bipolar disorder and not with other common forms of mental illness such as depression and schizophrenia.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, studied more than 300,000 patients treated for mental illness over a 30 year period. The patients and their relatives were compared with a cross-sample of the general Swedish population.

Their findings, reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry, found that people with bipolar disorder are much more likely than others to work in creative industries.

The healthy siblings of people with other kinds of mental illness were also likely to be creative, they found.

Researcher Dr Simon Kyaga said: "Creativity has long been associated with mental disorder, epitomised by Aristotle's alleged claim that no great genius has ever existed without a strain of madness.

"Our study, which is much larger than previous studies, shows that people with bipolar disorder, and their siblings, are more likely to work in creative professions."

Writing in the same journal Professor Kay Redfield Jamison, of the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, says: "Most people who are creative do not have mental illness, and most people who are mentally ill are not unusually creative.

"It is, rather, that there is a disproportionate rate of psychopathology, especially bipolar disorder, in highly creative individuals."

Creativity and mental disorder: family study of 300,000 patients with severe mental disorder. Kyaga S, Lichtenstein P, Boman M, Hultman C, Långström N and Landén M. British Journal of Psychiatry 2011; 199:373-379

Tags: Europe | General Health | Mental Health

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