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Creativity, Madness and Drugs (2013) (scientificamerican.com)
2 points by ghosh on Nov 10, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment


I'm surprised to see this sort of article from Scientific American, maybe I shouldn't be. If I didn't know better, I'd have thought it came from RollingStone. It's an interesting read, but binding successful creativity to mental illness and drug use ignores the majority of people who suffer from mental illness or partake (and sometimes become severely addicted as the article gives examples) to drugs without any sort of creative outlet or benefit to society.

Would we really not have had Poe's the Raven had he been treated for bi-polar? Did the disease so affect the writer that he would not have been a writer without it? Maybe he would have written something else even more profound.




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