Art as a Mental Health Precursor: The link between creativity and mental illness.
The biggest window we hold into the creative mind is through artistic expression. Art is utilized as a tool for many different facets, including the ability to invoke and express emotion. Art is even used as a form of therapy through methods such as listening or producing music, painting, dancing, or other methods with the intent to provide clients facing daily challenges with a way to alleviate issues such as stress (5). Although I agree that there can be many positive results through art related therapies, it also seems ironic considering that there has been research supporting the idea that mental disorders are associated with increased levels of creativity or artistic skill.
The most famous and impactful artists have been known to experience mental health problems, involving painters, musicians, artists, comedians writers and actors. Van Gogh suffered from anxiety and depression and, for a more modern case, Pete Wentz, the bassist for Fall Out Boy, is living with bipolar disorder.
Of course, mental health could impact every type of person, but there is the possibility that the creative mind could put someone at a higher risk for a psychological disorder. There has been previous research on the topic of possible trends in artistry and psychopathology. One study was conducted on individuals with bipolar disorder and found that them, as well as their relatives without bipolar disorder, had over-represented artistic and scientific occupations (4). Within the same study it was found that the relatives of people with schizophrenia also over-represented artistic and scientific occupations, however, the individuals who actually had schizophrenia did not. The reality of this finding may contribute to the fact that people with schizophrenia could have difficulty maintaining an occupation, which may have strongly impacted the results of the study. Another study involved looking at the risk in the eventual development of bipolar disorder for 16-year-old students with above-average school performance in relation to GPA (2). The findings suggested that there should be further research looking into the overlap between creativity, educational achievement and intelligence and whether or not bipolar disorder or other psychoses may hold an association with these factors.
These past studies led up to a case-control study and sibling-pair (sib-pair) analysis that looked at artistic creativity and the risk for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and unipolar depression through Swedish registries (3). Before I go into the study, I would like to note that the past three studies mentioned are all from the Swedish national registers. Although generalizability is obstructed to other populations, I also hold an admiration for Sweden’s impressive organizational skills for holding many registers that keep track of many aspects of their population. To bring this back to relevance, the case-control design looked at the population of Sweden through different databases. They collected data from higher education registrations, registered sibling pairs living in Sweden after 1960 and registrations of psychiatric hospitalizations since 1973. To avoid variables that could impact the clarity of the results, the researchers removed individuals from the data that were born outside of Sweden as well as individuals who were missing data on their education level. In addition, they organized the hospitalization registry data into people who were diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or unipolar depression from anytime between January 1973 to December 2009. Anyone who did not fall under the registered psychoses or who was involved in the sib-pair analysis were a part of the control group. After removing unwanted data form the sample, they ended up with a whopping total of 4,454,763 individuals for their analyses. Hopefully that brings some awareness to my emphasis on the impressive registry that Sweden holds.
Instead of looking at occupations to measure artistic values, these researchers looked at individuals who studied an artistically creative subject at a university. The students were not necessarily art majors, just people who took art courses in higher education. Therefore, there is the assumption that these individuals who studied an art subject have some level of creativity.
Artistic creativity is defined in two main ways in the study; the first definition is broader, looking at any art and media course but excluding the science and history of artistic subjects. The second and more narrow definition goes more into classes that were either visual arts, music, dance, theatre, drama, film, radio, TV production, and fashion design. They then also organized subjects into more specific specializations of either visual or performing arts, to see if there could possibly be a trend in one type of artistic style over another.
The data was conducted in a statistical analysis that adjusted for age and gender so that people were being compared more fairly to each other. A separate analysis also adjusted for highest educational level achieved to adjust for possible effects of university attendance. In addition, the sib-pair analysis was conducted to compare the odds of developing a mental disorder to siblings who remained healthy. The results suggested that there were associations between studying artistically creative art subjects to being registered into a hospital for having schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and unipolar depression. This association remained within the sib-pair analysis, which means that family factors cannot solely explain for the diagnoses of the psychoses. They also found higher associations within the narrower definition of creativity as well as stronger associations for visual arts than performing arts. The researchers state that it makes sense for visual arts to have a higher association with creativity, suggesting that visual arts may sometimes depend on more creativity than performing arts, which may involve more interpretation than creativity. This poses an interesting phenomenon, where it can be argued that creativity is utilized more within visual arts, or perhaps, other factors impact this result, such as personal expression.
Although the study found that registering for an artistic subject is associated with increased risk for all three disorders, I do have some concerns with the actual implications of this research. A strong limitation is based on the difficulty of measuring creativity. Just because a student registered for an artistic class, it does not necessarily mean that the student is specifically creative or artistic. However, the researchers argue that the decision to study a creative subject in secondary education implies an intent to engage in creative pursuits and may have a higher than average level of creative ability (3).
I feel that this is a fair assumption considering the fact that if I were to register for an art class at my university, I would be surprised (and quite amused) if I were to see someone was still performing at the stick-figure level. In addition, there could be other variables that factor into the increased risk of developing these disorders later on. One strong factor could be personality. The type of person who would engage in artistic activities may contain characteristics that could make them more susceptible to psychosis. For example, the type of person who holds a creative mind and enjoys artistic expression could be more likely to dislike rigid schedules or strict instructions from people. Perhaps, these qualities are higher risk factors for the researched disorders than people who were also creative but registered for economics classes and enjoy a nine-to-five job schedule.
Another thought is whether or not disorders could enhance the creative mind. Edvard Munch, the artist famous for his painting, The Scream, has written that he “cannot get rid of [his] illnesses, for there is a lot in [his] art that exists only because of them” (1).
In this case, the painting does seem to be well explained by the quote, but I would hope that creativity does not require mental illness. There could be the possibility that all the greatest creative minds must eventually sacrifice their talents to inner demons. Considering there are many healthy and creative minds that exist and have existed, there is a slim chance there is truth in that. To be more confident, though, a good place for further research would be to look into artistic individuals have not developed any psychopathology.
References:
1. Lubow, A. (2019). Edvard Munch: Beyond The Scream. [online] Smithsonian. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/edvard-munch-beyond-the-scream-111810150/ [Accessed 20 Nov. 2019].
2. MacCabe, J. H., Lambe, M. P., Cnattingiu,s S., Sham, P.C., David, A.S., Reichenberg, A., et al. (2010). Excellent school performance at age 16 and risk of adult bipolar disorder: national cohort study. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 196, 109–115.
3. MacCabe, J. H., Sariaslan, A., Almqvist, C., Lichtenstein, P., Larsson, H., & Kyaga S. (2018). Artistic creativity and risk for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and unipolar depression: a Swedish population-based case-control study and sib-pair analysis. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 212, 370–378. doi: 10.1192/bjp.2018.23
4. Kyaga S., Lichtenstein P., Boman M., Hultman C., Långström N., Landén M. (2011). Creativity and mental disorder: family study of 300,000 people with severe mental disorder. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 199(1) 373–379.
5. Regev, D. & Cohen-Yatziv, L. (2018). Effectiveness of art therapy with adult clients in 2018- What progress has been made? Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1531. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01531
