Three books about Artists, Madness, and the Price of Greatness

["Best of Chicago Art Magazine" re-post. Originally appeared 5/9/10]

Carrie McGath

Introduction

In my last article, “Artists, Bipolar, and the Role of Medication”, I spoke openly about my own experiences as an artist who suffers from Bipolar. This article did exactly what I intended it to do: begin a discussion of the issues surrounding Bipolar and the creative imagination. I am very pleased by this discussion and hope it continues throughout this series where I will discuss the relation between mental illness and creativity.

In the years since being diagnosed, I began my own research on Bipolar, finding several studies of the direct correlation in my Bipolar episodes of either hypomania or depression and my creativity. When I began to take medications such as mood stabilizers and anti-depressants, I began to sense my creativity lagging, leading me (right or wrong) to eventually cease my use of medication. I am coming around again to wanting to take medication again since it is very difficult to live with this illness unmedicated. Bipolar can effect my work, my finances, and just daily life in general.

Of late, going in and out of deep depressions and hypomanic nights here and there, I find it difficult to speak to people, to interact with the world. In these states, I feel odd and hazy, as if I am not a person but a shadow who watches the world living around me. The only good thing that comes of this is an inexplicable solitude in all moments of my days that cause my senses to be heightened, causing me to observe so many things around me that I would normally not be “able” to see. For instance, a man just sitting on the El becomes someone I can “read,” or at least feel I can read, feeling I know what he is feeling and hoping and dreaming as I sit near him.

Senses are heightened in these states, so is that why so many artists find their illness something that is at once a blessing (for their creative work) and a curse (for living day to day)? My research has led me to three books that I have found helpful, fascinating, and truly comforting. Philosopher Julia Kristeva’s book, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia; Arnold M. Ludwig’s scientific study of illness and its relation to creativity, The Price of Greatness; and Bipolar sufferer and psychiatrist, Kay Redfield Jamison’s book, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament have all given me priceless information and immeasurable comfort. In this piece, I will talk a bit about each of these books in the hope that they may help readers here to find such comfort.

About Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia by Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher born on June 24, 1941. I am a longtime fan of all of her work; it is intriguing and engaging, her writing always poised with a poetic sensibility. She is prolific in her work, writing everything from novels, to philosophical works, to criticism, even touching on mental illness in Black Sun from 1989. I came upon this book by chance when I was shelving books in the Flaxman Library at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, finding it staring up at me from the black book truck, cluing me in to the knowledge that someone else in the library was interested in learning more about depression, possibly for themselves. Being a library at an art school, one must deduce that someone creative was seeking the comfort that I was seeking. There is a great comfort in answers, in a book like Kristeva’s, where you no longer feel alone, but you also read it and think, “Yes! Yes! I know that feeling, I know that kind of moment, that kind of day, that kind of midnight …”

The first moment I read the book, I fixated on the following lines because they gave me a moment to see myself in another person, something much needed when one is plagued with Depression:

An infinite number of misfortunes weigh us down everyday … All this suddenly gives me another life. A life that is unlivable, heavy with daily sorrow, tears held back or shed, a total despair, scorching at times, than wan and empty. In short, a devitalized  existence that, although occasionally fired by the effort I make  to prolong it, is ready at any moment for a plunge into death (4).

This passage was everything to me when I discovered it, almost becoming a mantra in a sense, to justify my existence and my deep and complex feelings of ending that existence. This passage is still one I carry with me as well as another. She also writes, “… the power of the events that create my depression is often out of proportion to the disaster that suddenly overwhelms me” (4). This, too, is something that plagues me in moments of Depression. When and if I do divulge my innermost depressive feelings to another person, the answer is often one resembling, “But you have so much going for you. You should be so happy!” I realize this response is in part misunderstanding because of a lack of experience with mental illness or just an uncomfortable need to end such a dark-cornered conversation. I am aware, however, that things like an ended relationship or some professional failure may not seem like something that should send me into considering suicide, but these daily griefs do send me and other sufferers into precisely this place.

In the section of the book called, “Is Mood a Language?” Kristeva writes, “Sadness is the fundamental mood of depression, and even if manic euphoria alternates with it the bipolar forms of that ailment, sorrow is the major outward sign that gives away the desperate person” (21). In literature, Kristeva ponders the mood of the resulting artwork, the mood language if you will, “The ‘semiotic’ and the ‘symbolic’ become the communicable imprints of an affective reality, perceptible to a reader (I like this book because it conveys sadness, anguish, or joy) and yet dominated, set aside, vanquished” (22).

Black Sun continues as a heady adventure into both psychology and philosophy in Kristeva’s aim to better understand and discuss it. Depression is something that is often inexplicable. For me, the only language for it is through creation. In this state I am able to write a poem or create a photomontage that tells a story that is happening inside of me that no daily sentence could ever truly contain. Kristeva does this in Black Sun with a creative intellect giving this indescribable illness a footing, giving its readers a comfort that is truly priceless and unforgettable.

About The Price of Greatness by Arnold M. Ludwig

The scientific study of the controversial relation of creativity and illness, psychiatrist Arnold M. Ludwig shows this relation via charts, graphs, and complex algorithms. Written in an engaging, almost journalistic, essay fashion, this markedly scientific work is readable and understandable to all readers. “My findings show consistently and clearly that members of the artistic professions or creative arts as a whole — architecture, design, art, composing, musical entertainment, theater, and all forms of writing — suffer from more types of mental difficulties and do so over longer periods of their lives than members of other professions” (4). This breaks down into further categories of illness and even substance abuse among the creative set, according to Ludwig. “Illicit drug use is more common among musical performers and actors. Musical composers, artists, and nonfiction writers suffer mostly from alcoholism and depression … Poets show a high prevalence of both mania and psychoses. Poets, actors, fiction writers, and musical entertainers are more likely to attempt suicide” (5).

The book continues to outline meticulously Ludwig’s well-supported contention of the relation between creative people and illness. One of the most intriguing studies he does is an absolute part of my study of this topic as a poet, a “chicken or the egg” notion. In the section, “What Precedes What,” Ludwig shows his extensive research to see when instances of mental illnesses relates with a creative accomplishment. “Information of this nature was available on 632 persons. In about one-half of these persons, their first bout of mental illness happened at least one year after their initial professional success, and in about one-fourth, it happened and was resolved at least one year before” (160).

So what does this mean in our topic at hand for this column and for Ludwig’s groundbreaking study of this controversial kinship of illness and creative work? His scientific approaches and research-ridden The Price of Greatness shows again and again this connection, becoming a sort of comfort for myself and most likely many others. The charts I am picturing here show these sobering statistics he gathered in the years he worked on this study. This is a book that is easily approachable and informative and should be considered as a definite read for sufferers, as well as their friends and families.

About Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison

Jamison opens the book with a quotation from the Romantic poet, Lord Byron: “‘We of the craft are all crazy. Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched’” (7). This is the springboard for Jamison’s study of the relation between Bipolar (aka: Manic-Depression) and creativity. Kay Redfield Jamison is a practicing psychiatrist who is also herself a Bipolar sufferer. Much of her work focuses on this correlation between “that fine madness” as she calls it, and creativity.

Like Ludwig, Jamison includes some graphs in this study also coming from the scientific perspective of psychiatry. But instead of more generalized findings, she focuses some of her graphs on specific artists in history (such as Vincent Van Gogh) to illustrate their mental difficulties and creative production. She also includes a chart that encompasses seasonal effects on artists and writers and their moods relating to their creativity. Jamison writes, “A possible link between madness and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural notions; it is also one of the most controversial” (50). For me, the things of life that are the most controversial are usually the very things that possess some truth and this is no exception. She continues, “There are several ways to examine the relationship between mood disorders, or effective illness, and artistic creativity” (56). This contention is laid out, like Ludwig, via the scientific method through charts and research.

Recently, more systematic biographical research has given strong support to a much higher rate of mood disorders in artistic populations than could be expected from chance alone. Diagnostic and psycho-logical studies of living writers and artists, conducted during the past twenty years, give more scientifically meaningful estimates of the rates and types of psychopathology in groups of artists and writers. Finally, studies of creative and related achievement in affectively ill patients provide corroborating evidence from a different perspective, as do family studies of psychopathology and creative accomplishment (56).

Jamison’s book continues with graphs and close studies of both living and dead artists and writers that truly gives a backbone to her argument of the existence of the “fine madness” and creative production.

Reading these books, one can get a handle on the controversial notion of the relation between artists and mental illness. These books are all engaging and accessible reads in their deep musings about artists who have suffered from both mental and physical illness. They will always be a great comfort to me, books I will return to again and again so that I may stay informed in a secure footing that truly makes a priceless difference in my life as a Bipolar poet. My hope is that these books open a door for others as well, that oft tightly shut door of mental illness that I hope will remain open in order to inform and remove so many stigmas that follow us like shadows.

Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. (on Amazon.com)

Ludwig, Arnold M. The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy. New York: The Guilford Press, 1995. (on Amazon.com)

Jamison, Kay Redfield. Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. New York: The Free Press, 1993. (on Amazon.com)