Having a mental illness doesn’t make you a genius
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Version 0 of 1. What do Britney Spears, Elgar, Jackson Pollock and Virginia Woolf have in common? The answer, should the question ever come up during a strangely morbid pub quiz, is that they all experienced bipolar disorder. That’s if posthumous diagnoses by media psychologists are to be trusted. Other artists touted as belonging to the bipolar club? Graham Greene, Dusty Springfield, Spike Milligan … the list is long. Perhaps no surprise, then, that a new study says those with genetic risk factors for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are 25% more likely to be creative. The results, however, depend on the sturdiness of the science behind those genetic risk factors and, indeed, what one even means by “creative”. Related: Teen suicide rates are bleak. School-based clinics help those in crisis | Amy Tran There is no definitive brain scan for bipolar disorder or schizophrenia; no swab, or test or sample that provides an affirmative diagnosis or otherwise. Instead, just genes with names that resemble number plates: ADCY2, ANK3, ODZ4, associated with exposure, but not causation. Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are just sets and subsets of symptoms that hang together in diagnostic manuals, the DSM-V and the ICD, as are most mental illnesses. I am aware that this is not the popular narrative. Instead, what we pay to see in the cinema, in countless biopics of tortured artists, is the poet, chain-smoking in his sepia study, grinding his fingers into his temples as the iambs flow, or the dancer, soaring on the stage, hallucinating in the wings. That’s the acceptable kind of mental illness. The cool kind. The arty kind, the kind that comes with handsome, dishevelled hair and record deals, and brief stints in the legendary McLean Hospital. It’s not, however, for the majority of people with mental illness, a recognisable life. A mundane checklist of symptoms in a doctor’s office – suicidal ideation/feelings of emptiness/habitual crying – rather throws a more sober, bare-bulbed light on the romantic notion of doom. I dropped out of school while studying for A-levels. Depression meant sleeping for up to 20 hours a day. It meant not showering. It was the heavy tick of the clock for the fours hours it took to leave the house, because I knew I was a piece of shit, and I thought other people shouldn’t have to deal with a piece of shit walking among them. What about those with mental illness who work in retail or pull pints? Do these people not get a look-in? The times I did make it into class, however, I would be met with kids clutching Plath paperbacks, Nirvana badges pinned to rucksacks, their Liverpudlian accents oddly morphed into a Kerouacian drawl, reading verse about death and dying and the dead. Then, these kids wiped the kohl from their eyelids and went off to get degrees. I stayed in bed, remained a piece of shit. I still don’t have A-levels. It’s not that I would want to dismiss any notion that mental illness is linked with creativity – the psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison has written an excellent book, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, arguing that there is a connection. So the concept itself isn’t a problem; rather, it’s the danger inherent in the tortured-genius trope that I object to. What about those with mental illness who work in retail, or are civil servants, or who pull pints? Do these people not get a look-in? How many albums does a person need to make, how many prizes need to be won before mental health issues become acceptable? I wish as much money was spent on mental health services and treatment as is spent on the economy of mental illness as entertainment and intrigue – in the suicide tourism trade, or on paying actors appearing in Oscar bait. Pity too, those with diagnoses not as fashionable as bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder – these ones aren’t OK, right? Those ones are a bit weird. Cross the street to avoid them. Neither do I subscribe to the school of thought that medicine stifles the creative spirit. Medicine that doesn’t suit can cause muddled thoughts, but the right kind of medicine means a clearer mind, a more productive mind. It was Dorothy Parker who said that “writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat”, and that’s a very hard thing to do in the middle of a manic episode. Oh, sure, it’s easy to splurge 30,000 words and think them the beginnings of a new Ulysses, but look back when equilibrium is restored and find that the genius hasn’t quite stuck. Likewise, ask the person in the full grip of depression how their concentration is; they will no doubt ask you to repeat the question. Van Gogh put it best: “If I could have worked without this accursed disease, what things I might have done.” |