Elyn Saks, author of The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, shares her thoughts on the connection between creativity and a mental illness like her schizophrenia:
The book she mentions is Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. Yesterday’s introductory videos from Saks are here. Readers continue the thread:
I’ve struggled with severe panic and anxiety issues for years. I take an SSRI every day and have for probably a dozen years. If I go off of it four or five days, I’m in real trouble. It is not a pleasant feeling.
However, if I am off for a few days, that second and third day give me a huge burst of creativity. In college when I had a big paper due, I would start the outline on day one, put together some paragraphs on day two, and then on day three I would bang out 20 pages effortlessly. This is something I stopped doing years ago. It wasn’t healthy mentally or physically. But there is something to it.
Another who struggles with mental illness:
A quick comment about mental illness being some sort of gift from someone who has been wrestling with PTSD, a mild form of bi-polar disorder and a dissociative disorder for decades. Like so many things that are out there that can give you a temporary ability to exceed your relatively normal operating envelope, there are negative tradeoffs – many of which lead to agonizing self-destruction behaviors. This is very well known, but I think bears repeating. Glamorizing and romanticizing the occasional exceptionally high-functioning moment while ignoring the agony and constant struggle each day usually is just continues to marginalize those of us who suffer from profound and usually very difficult to diagnose disorders.
The Dish 