Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Friday 18 May 2018

Creative people don't have mood disorders

TLDR : Nope, not really. There's so much subjectivity and bias to measuring both creativity and mood disorders that they're almost immeasurable, never mind looking for a correlation. What evidence there is can be equally well explained by completely different factors. For example, on people in creative occupations having more mood disorders :

The creative occupations considered in these studies are overwhelmingly in the arts, which frequently provide greater autonomy and less rigid structure than the average nine-to-five job. This makes these jobs more conducive to the success of individuals who struggle with performance consistency as the result of a mood disorder... Therefore, it is possible that many people who suffer from mood disorders gravitate towards these types of professions, regardless of creative ability or inclination.

And to skip ahead to the conclusions :

Believing that creativity is due to some underlying, uncontrollable factor reinforces the idea that few people are capable of true creativity, which prevents many from realising their own potential. It also undermines the skill and effort that creative endeavours require, if we can simply chalk it up to the consequence of a disorder. And the connection between mood disorders and creativity influences the very way we view the creative work of others: university students who were told the story of Van Gogh cutting off his ear before they examined his painting Sunflowers (1888) took a more favourable view of it than those who weren’t told the story. Similarly, students priced a piece of artwork higher when a fictitious artist’s biography briefly mentioned that he was ‘often described as very eccentric’.

There's an obvious similarity to the myth of the lone genius, of course. People like to believe that if someone has an exceptional skill or ability then they must be compensationally mediocre in other ways : "Assuredly, no one man has been blessed with all God's gifts. You, Hannibal, know how to gain a victory; you do not know how to use it." And frankly, people who are amazingly talented, successful and attractive are frickin' annoying rare. Yet I'll vouch that the popular idea of scientists being socially awkward misanthropes is both damaging and untrue - it gives people an excuse to reject, shall we say, inconvenient truths (perhaps more interesting in this context is whether or not anyone can be good at mathematical/scientific analysis and that the lone genius myth prevents them from achieving that). Artists, I'll venture, probably don't much live up to the moody dishevelled stereotype much either (though I'll bet the poverty one is more accurate, but hope to be wrong about that too).
https://aeon.co/essays/is-there-any-evidence-linking-creativity-and-mood-disorders

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