Creative Chaos

Genise Caruso

November, 2006

2700 words

Creative Chaos

Suicide.  The mere mention of the word makes most of us disturbingly uncomfortable.  Yet, just as we run outside and down the street wearing only a bathrobe, transfixed by a cavalcade of emergency vehicles’ flashing lights, urgently needing to know “what happened,” our morbid curiosity about suicide overcomes our apprehension.  Sure we’re squeamish and will deal with it only if we can act like adolescents, hiding their eyes (with open hands) or covering their heads (with see-through blankets) while watching “scary” movies.  Despite our fear and outrage, we are still compelled to sneak a peek!

Scientists have documented the accounts of creative individuals and mood disorders since the nineteenth century, but only in the past 20 years, have methodical studies confirmed these findings. (Granato).  One well-founded result strongly implied that writers, artists and composers, and their close relatives, were considerably more at risk to suffer from mood disorders, and to commit suicide, than was the mainstream population.  (Granato).

Studies suggest that creativity and manic depression are both genetically driven and share some of the same genetic predispositions. (McCook).  They also share certain non-cognitive features, such as the ability to thrive on only a few hours of sleep,

acute focus to work meticulously, spirited and tenacious personalities, and the capacity of experiencing intensely powerful and profoundly changeable emotions. (Granato).

Death by suicide has been proven to exist since primitive times.  A volatile topic by any account, our beliefs and views about suicide have changed significantly throughout history.  Geographic location, cultural attitudes, economic and social status and religious influences all profoundly impacted our viewpoint on suicide and death in general.  Opinions ranged from the Goths and Celts who literally encouraged suicide, to societies where wives killed themselves to follow their dead husbands into the next life.  Buddhist tradition used suicide to avoid humiliation and ancient Egyptians viewed death simply as the passage between lives, therefore saw no dishonor associated with suicide.  (Saint-Laurent, Farberow).  The Greeks and Romans accepted suicide for the upper class, but condemned it for the lower class.  Roman attitude toward death was so casual, it had little meaning and suicide became mainly economically oriented. (Saint-Laurent, Farberow).  

The Renaissance of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries brought a change in outlook toward death.  Writings helped raise awareness and questioned the condemnation of suicide.  English poet, John Donne’s Biothantos was the first defense of it written in English.  Shakespeare wrote 14 suicides into his eight tragedies. (Saint-Laurent, Farberow).  Writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were more sympathetic and focused their writings on the rights of the individual.  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which became known as the Romantic Age, poets had a great impact on the concept of death.  George Howe Colt’s book, The Enigma of Suicide, about the young English poet, Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide at the age of 17, became instrumental in turning youth, death and poetry into counterparts.  He said “The poetic sensibility was too good for this world; it was best to burn brightly and die young, like a shooting star.” (Saint-Laurent, Farberow).

The greatest change came in the nineteenth century, when suicide was associated with the word disgrace.  It became more correlated with mental illness and often hidden by families. (Saint-Laurent, Farberow).  For centuries, stories about famous writers, artists and musicians taking their lives, raised many eyebrows, while scientists tried to make a connection between manic depression and creative output. (“Creativity”).  Van Gogh, Mark Rothko, Anne Sexton, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf all committed suicide, while writers Dickinson, Eliot, Poe, Emerson, Faulkner, Ibsen and Tolstoy suffered from some form of depressive illness.  Writers weren’t the only group affected, as great artists, including Gauguin, Jackson Pollock, Michelangelo and O’Keefe, and musicians/composers Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter also were known to have mental illness. (“Creativity”).

Kay Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, and author of Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artist Temperament, and An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, is a foremost authority on manic-depressive illness, as she’s experienced it firsthand.  She says, “writers were 10 to 20 times as likely as other people to suffer manic-depressive or depressive illnesses, which lead to suicide more often than any other mental disorders do. The cognitive style of manic-depression overlaps with the creative temperament. When we think of creative writers, we think of boldness, sensitivity, restlessness, discontent; this is the manic-depressive temperament.” (Grimes).    Researchers have found that “in a mildly manic state, subjects think more quickly, fluidly and originally.  In a depressed state, subjects are self-critical and obsessive, an ideal frame of mind for revision and editing.” (Grimes).

It’s also been thought that writers, more than other types of creative individuals, become seduced by the “attractiveness of suicide as a means of controlling their life story.” (Grimes).  Both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton shared the notion that a great artist’s life must end in death.  They stop before they write more bad stuff. When Sexton learned of Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, she said “Good for him.”  (Grimes).

An ongoing problem is finding effective ways to treat these disorders.  Treatment of depressive illnesses in artistic individuals has presented doctors and patients alike with unique challenges.  A major concern is that creativity and the disorder are so closely connected that the treatment may destroy the unique artistic talent. (“Creativity”).  It is suggested that many of the common medications used to treat depressive disorders simply turn one into “zombies.”  Staff writer for Seattle Weekly, Philip Dawdy said, “Those pills are like neutron bombs; you’re still standing, but your feelings and healthy range of emotional responses to the world are dead.” (Dawdy).  This is a very real and frightening prospect to anyone who has considered taking that path.