
Beautiful Minds: Relations between genius, creativeness and mental illness - fogus
http://spacecollective.org/Olena/5122/Beautiful-Minds
======
tokenadult
This issue is much discussed here on HN. The links RiderofGiraffes kindly
shared didn't include either HN thread that submitted the Scientific American
article mentioned in the blog post submitted here.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788259>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795292>

As I noted in each of those threads, the issue of connections between
creativity and mood disorders has been studied at book length. The most
authoritative of the several books on that issue is by psychologist (and mood
disorder patient) Kay Redfield Jamison, author of Touched with Fire: Manic-
Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament,

[http://www.amazon.com/Touched-Fire-Manic-Depressive-
Artistic...](http://www.amazon.com/Touched-Fire-Manic-Depressive-Artistic-
Temperament/dp/068483183X/)

and co-author of the definitive text on manic-depressive illness

[http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-
Rec...](http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Recurrent-
Depression/dp/0195135792/)

who has thought out loud in her writings over the years about whether
treatments for depression that help suffering people may also deprive society
of creative output. Her current thinking on the issue--and she takes lithium
herself every day--is that the best-evidenced mood-stabilizing treatments for
mood disorders are helpful to patients and increase rather than decrease their
ability to contribute useful work product to society. Her co-author, Frederick
K. Goodwin, M.D., is still deeply skeptical of some antidepressant medications
(e.g., the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) because of their capacity
for inducing mania in many bipolar patients.

P.S. The illness of game theorist John Nash, the subject of the wonderful book
A Beautiful Mind, was almost surely manic-depressive illness rather than
schizophrenia. At the time he was diagnosed, American physicians misdiagnosed
about 50 percent of cases of manic-depressive illness as schizophrenia,
because of the mistaken diagnostic criteria used in Freudian psychiatry.
Patients started getting better sooner in America as their diagnosis and
treatment improved based on ideas from Europe (Kraepelin's diagnostic
categories), Australia (lithium treatment for mood disorders), and America
itself (cognitive talk therapy as pioneered by Aaron Beck, a former Freudian
who found out that Freudian views of depression were incorrect).

There seems to be a seasonal surge of interest in this subject on HN right
now. Hm.

~~~
fogus
Thanks for the great run-down! I had no idea that it was such a hot topic on
HN when I submitted it, I know where my time is going today. ;)

------
zoba
I found an article about Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals. It
talks about this a bit. Part of what I took from the article is that gifted
individuals have the capacity to appreciate things more than non gifted
people. Therefore, when a depressing thing is being understood by a gifted
person, it hits the person much harder than a non gifted because they can
really understand all of what it means.

[http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Webb_Existentia...](http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Webb_ExistentialDepressionInGiftedIndividuals.shtml)

~~~
tokenadult
I've had a lot of discussions with parents of gifted children about this, as I
am now the state president of an association dealing with gifted education.
And I have attended a conference of the national organization that hosts the
link you kindly shared. I have two comments:

a) There is some indication in some studies that high IQ is correlated with
(that is, is a "risk factor" for) depressive illness. It is not at all clear
what the causal mechanism may be, as correlation is not necessarily a sign of
causation.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation)

There is still ongoing research in various world cultures to confirm and
explicate this finding of some studies.

b) Some parents who talk about "existential depression" are just engaging in
euphemism. Their children have regular, everyday depression, just like some
kids who are not gifted. There is no carefully controlled study at all

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

suggesting much uniqueness in the expression of depressed mood in high-IQ
persons as contrasted with average-IQ persons.

Everyone who feels depressed deserves and needs compassion. (A fairly robust
study finding is that persons who experience depression tend to experience
less compassion from persons near to them than do persons who do not
experience depression.) And gifted learners most definitely need educational
provisions different from typical school programs. High-IQ adults may or may
not feel they have a supportive social circle, depending crucially on their
paths to higher education and the careers they pursue. Gifted people in
general have special needs, and depressed people in general have special
needs, and there may be a special intersection of needs in gifted people who
are depressed, but it is not clear yet what role, if any, giftedness has in
mood disorders.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
See also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797723>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101255>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121063>

------
alan-crowe
Sometimes genius is about breaking through to sanity despite being surrounded
by collective insanity. For example, Galileo's work on kinematics required a
break through in attitude: that the discussion of quantitative phenomena
required measurement and calculation. Given the limitations of metrology at
the time any-one who strayed away from adjectives and blather was doomed to
confuse themselves with experimental error. Galileo had to break through the
insanity of simply accepting those limitations and cultivate the sanity of
plugging away at improving your experimental set up until you got usable
numbers.

As a more modern example, the happy few who have made fortunes anticipating
the current financial crisis have a claim on the title "financial genius". The
insanity is believing that you cannot be too highly leveraged because house
prices never fall. The genius lies in not getting sucked into the madness at
the time; it looks unimpressive later, after the bubble has burst.

"Unimpressive later" but how did it look at the time? If you break through to
sanity despite being surrounded by collective insanity, your contempories look
at you askance before delivering their verdict: it is you that is mad.

This does horrible things to our ability to look at the realtion between
genius and mental illness. Even if the route to genius lies in cultivating
sanity, us mundane onlookers will still come away with the idea that geniuses
are mad and be tempted to go in the opposite direction.

People love that Niels Bohr quote "We are all agreed that your theory is
crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a
chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough." but
quantum mechanics does not need to be invented twice. The usual nature genius
is to see through the turbid intellectual drama of one's own time to grasp
ideas that will one day seem plodding and obvious.

------
YuriNiyazov
I suspect that there is significant sample/perception bias in noticing the
mental illnesses and suicides of famous people, because they are famous and
attract attention. There are probably a lot of uncreative people who have
significant mood disorder issues.

------
10ren
But what do _rats_ use the 5HT1A receptor for? Assuming that we humans do in
fact use it for rumination, are they doing the rat equivalent?

Do they... ponder?

------
10ren
I did not know that the founder/inventor of Kodak film committed suicide. “My
work is done. Why wait?”

~~~
angelbob
There's a great analysis of his suicide, I think in the book "The Moral
Animal". It made a lot of sense, when viewed from his point of view.

Eastman was an energetic, engaging and vivacious young man who had been
brought low by a series of illnesses -- including severe back problems such
that he could hardly walk from room to room without pain. That prevented him
from going out and photographing, which was his lifelong passion. His children
were grown, and his company had succeeded past the point of needing him day to
day.

His summary of the situation was a pretty good one.

------
jlees
The more I read articles like this, the more I start thinking my manic
depressiveness is somehow _cool_. (If not even _required_ for a successful
entrepreneurial or creative career.)

At least it's a step above freak, I guess.

------
simplegeek
I didn't come across that Scientific American article before (which this link
discusses) but it indeed is one of the best explanations I've found so far--
imho.

------
arijo
If one thinks of evolution not in terms of human beings as the evolving unit
but in terms of groups of humans, depression - caused by a feeling of
inadequacy and causing isolation and eventual death of the depressed person -
might be explained by an higher likelihood of group survival chances and gene
pool preservation.

~~~
runningdogx
I think a group of humans can certainly be regarded as an organism in its own
right. I think far too few people take this "new-age" concept of meta- or
super-organisms seriously. However, evolution cannot work in the same way on
such meta-organisms.

Intelligence and the emergent phenomena it creates (strategic planning,
willful competition) will logically overshadow almost everything else in
determining group survival for higher organisms.

I suppose one could make a different but related argument that because certain
mood disorders seem to be linked to creativity and intelligence, and because
those things confer group advantage (in developing competitive strategy),
depression might indirectly provide group advantage.

~~~
arijo
"I suppose one could make a different but related argument that because
certain mood disorders seem to be linked to creativity and intelligence, and
because those things confer group advantage (in developing competitive
strategy), depression might indirectly provide group advantage." That's a
great counter-argument. But could I refute it as a tautology: mood
disorders->intelligence->group advantage->mood disorders (by genetic
inheritance of successful - though mood disordered - group members?

------
elblanco
This is a fascinating subject for me. I have an uncle who by all accounts was
a 1st-rate genius until he got to college, went mad and now spends most of his
days sleeping from all the medication he takes.

