“Does one have to be insane to be creative?” (UPDATED, May 13)

When write-ups of James Kaufman's paper, "The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young," appeared in magazines and newspapers last November, my reaction to the paper was similar to Mark Sanderson’s: I found Kaufman’s findings and the language he used to describe them “laughable.” The articles summarizing the paper were equally ridiculous; death was personified as a stalker, “drawn to” poets with a consistency that suggests creativity might emit its own magnetic field.

But, while I posted my response to Kaufman’s paper in December, Sanderson wrote about the paper (which originally appeared in the journal Death Studies) last week. In the past month, Kaufman’s work, for no timely reason I can name, has garnered another round of write-ups in major media outlets — and each write-up removes me from my initial response and prompts increasing queasiness. The study’s lasting appeal, to my mind, affirms the poet Maxine Kumin’s observation, quoted in the New York Times: "There is a lugubrious fascination, an erotic fascination, with the early death of poets.” And, earlier in the NY Times article (also available here), we get this quote from Kaufman’s paper: "The image of the writer as a doomed and sometimes tragic figure, bound to die young, can be backed up by research." Doom and tragedy, I suspect, are much too subjective to be measured by statistics, but Kaufman, throughout the article, continues to rely on a rhetoric that draws more on cultural tropes than psychiatric terminology. "If you ruminate more, you're more likely to be depressed, and poets ruminate,” Kaufman tells the NY Times. “Poets peak young. They write alone."

The article, though, does make mention of contradictory opinions and evidence. Michael Marmot, a professor of epidemiology and public health, prefers to understand poets’ early death rates in terms of the relationship between social status and good health. And Arnold M. Ludwig’s book The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy, points out that musical entertainers, on average, live 57.2 years —undermining, or, at least, questioning, Kaufman’s thesis that poets’ short life span (62.2 years) is best explained by the strong causal relationship between introspection, isolation, and mental instability.

My discussion of what Ludwig calls “the creativity and madness controversy” will be an ongoing series; in this entry, I want to temporarily cast aside questions about the scientific validity of Kaufman’s research, and 1) focus on the rhetoric employed in discussions of “creativity and madness,” 2) examine the psychological effects of that rhetoric, and 3) relay the discussions in terms of several recurring, perhaps irresolvable, conflicts.

Kaufman’s paper, for several reasons, is a wonderful starting point. A paper’s findings are often less important than, or deferent to, the rhetoric used in, and around, those findings. Even if a study does prove a link between creativity and mental illness, what does a “link” really mean? Often, the language describing the proposed “link” is influenced more by cultural tropes than by empirical research. The phrasing of Kaufman's title, "The Cost of the Muse,” for example, encourages the idea, unexamined in Kaufman’s paper, that mental illness functions as a commodity, with a high exchange value in the marketplace of creativity and social recognition. But, if we think of mental illness as an exchange or acquisition, we may be at risk of dehumanizing the subjective experience (or, more precisely: the pain) of mental illness.

Biographies of troubled artists included in studies on creativity often imply that a life is the sum of its failures and successes; a depressive episode, counted as a negative, might be followed, and balanced, by a positive integer of success. In effect, episodes of mental illness are retroactively redeemed, justified, or glamorized — and, reading such biographies, we might forget that life occurs in the present tense (and that memory and mood are egregiously sloppy accountants). Past—or, more ridiculously, future—successes can’t mitigate the pain of mental illness, and I imagine that a friend or doctor, trying to console a depressive writer by suggesting a relationship between pain and talent, could easily seem cold — a miser with his sympathy, which would cost him real emotion, and a wastrel with his compliments, which cost him nothing.

Collapsing mental illness and creativity into each other also encourages several real misunderstandings of mental illness. Halfway into a 2001 radio segment on writing and depression—paneled by Jennifer Radden (The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva), Nell Casey (Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression), and Nell’s sister, Maud Casey (The Shape of Things to Come), whose depression was the catalyst for Unholy Ghost — a listener named Brian calls in with his thoughts on the topic. Here’s a paraphrased transcript:

Brian: In the past year, I’ve decided to step away from medications. Now, I’m using depression as a fuel or energy to create. Depression doesn’t have to a bad thing, or a negative, and I think ‘the artist’ eventually realizes what real creative energy they get from their depression. So, you begin to see the embracing of [depression] as a way to get things done.
Nell: But depression has different levels. Someone really suffering is not going to be able to embrace it and do things.
Maud: My depression was un-embraceable … [It] was an obstacle. It was paralyzing.

Without having experienced —or seen someone close experience — a major depressive episode, it is, as Brian demonstrates, very easy to turn a causal relationship between depression and creativity into a conflation of them. But, in reality, it’s nearly impossible to be productive during a major depressive episode; as Maud and other writers can attest to, depression can be an unsurmountable obstacle to writing, rather than writing’s catalyst.

A similar radio segment from 2001, only available online in the form of a text summary, invited, among others, Dr. Louis Sass (Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought) and the writer Linda Gray Sexton, the late Anne Sexton’s daughter, to discuss the connection between "art and madness." The connection, as Sexton’s comments remind us, is not simply imposed upon writers; writers, too, often embrace it. Though Linda notes that her mother was “completely unproductive” when she was depressed or manic, Linda also “believes that her mother’s manic-depression gave Anne a sharper eye and sensitivity… access to things a ‘well’ person couldn’t have been able to access and use.”

Last year, I defended the connection between “art” and “madness” here. “Mental illness can inhibit creation,” I wrote, “but creation allows for the sense that ones mental suffering, otherwise senseless, can be redeemed.” Long episodes of depression have, in recent years, sapped my younger self’s ambition and my sense of entitlement to fiction; I wonder now if a style, tended to in a hothouse of depression, can yield real pleasures, and if the instincts I rely on when writing have become short-circuited by a self-indulgence so precise I mistake it for craftsmanship. But, when I was younger and un-medicated, my depression —or was it dysthymia back then? — forced productivity. Any psychological discomfort prompted a desperate retreat to my notebook or computer, and was translated into a story's dramatic tension.

I hated what my depression took from me — any sense of ease or comfort— and relied on, eventually learning to love, what it gave me — a delight in thought and language, a moral and critical self-awareness, and the secret belief that future greatness could be measured in degrees of difference and isolation. I needed to believe that depression was an early indication of literary talent — and that it might one day deliver me to a better life.

These hopes were as ridiculous as they were practical, as romantic as they were self-protective. But do such ideas, in some sense, promote mental illness? In the second radio segment,

Dempsey Rice notes that Linda Sexton’s writing and Anne Sexton’s poetry reflect one another and asks Linda if she thinks if either them would have been as successful had they not had manic-depressive illness. Linda replies that that one question is really the question of her life, “Does one have to be insane to be creative?” Throughout her career Linda has questioned weather she was ‘nuts’ enough to be a good writer. She continues to struggle with this question today.

“Madness,” so often marginalized, here becomes a site of exclusion—a genetic marker of literary nobility.

And so: the rhetoric of madness and creativity has multiple uses and cross-purposes. It can be employed to redeem madness, reify it, and dehumanize it. It can commodify pain, turning it into a means to an end, and, consequently, can allow the potential value of suffering to eclipse the experiential reality of suffering. But, if that encourages an unfair "naturalization" of mental illness in artists, it can also encourage a necessary psychological endurance, and counter the nihilism of pain.

And yet, one last point: the relationship between writing and madness may romanticize madness, but writers’ accounts of madness have also been responsible for humanizing it. When Nell Casey was asked on-air if she worried about the dangers of linking creativity to depression while working on her book, she responded that “having writers come out and put words to this illness” would mostly offer “a great deal of help.” Sufferers of depression struggle not only against their illness, but the stigma attached to it. And, to my mind, they also, very often, struggle against cultural and psychological simplifications of the experience. That’s why, despite the ideological risks I’ve mentioned, this blog addresses not only depression, but depression’s relationship to writing. I want to provide accounts of depression, taken from myself and others, that complicate the rhetoric and articulate ambiguities; I want to offer others moments of recognition and new starting points for honesty; and, ultimately, I want to examine the powers, and limits, of language in relation to depression.