Some Psychiatrist Say Creativity closely connected with Mental Illness

In a BBC article recently psychiatrists say creativity is often part of a mental illness, with writers particularly susceptible, according to a study of more than a million people. Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, the Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute found. They were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves.The dancers and photographers were also more likely to have bipolar disorder according to their report. The BBC article mentions several novelists with “disorders”. Novelist Virginia Woolf, who wrote A Room of One's Own and To the Lighthouse, had depression and drowned herself Fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote The Ugly Duckling and The Little Mermaid, had depression US author and journalist Ernest Hemingway, who wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, had depression and killed himself with a shotgun. Author and playwright Graham Greene, who wrote the novel Brighton Rock, had bipolar disorder. We don’t subscribe to this idea that creativity is close to mental illness. Creativity is one thing and an illness is another. Just because someone who writes a book is also depressed doesn't make a case in our view. Writing a novel is a large undertaking for anyone and it also involves risk, and potential fear of failure. These are normal feelings of normal people. Psychiatry’s only solution to depression or a person with a mental issue is to drug them. There methods in the past of shock treatment, involuntary confinement, and lobotomies didn't work and there “solutions” using drugs also doesn't work. In fact they make people worse. These drugs may also destroy the creativity of an artist or musician as a pharma drugs alters an artist’s viewpoint and vision. Drugs be it recreational or pharma drugs dump down a person and kills their creativity.