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Feb. 5th, 2010 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sathor"There are lists upon lists of those artists and writers who experienced the glorious highs and lethargic lows of bipolar illness. Virginia Woolf, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell are just a few on a long list of well-known writers (5); Tchaikovsky, van Gogh, and Pollock add composers and painters to the list of bipolar sufferers (6). This extensive documentation of writers’ own experiences with mood fluctuation is highly convincing of the link between bipolar illness and a creative temperament. Combine those writings with the overwhelming results of studies that find a far greater incidence of manic depression among artists and writers than among the general population, and the link is as well-established as a scientific truth can ever be.
This conclusion, however, leaves us with a few very pressing questions. These days, the automatic response to a diagnosis of manic-depression is to medicate the patient (3). While doubtless this creates a calmer life for both the patient and those around him or her, it is often doubtful whether the patient leads a happier life while on medication. As is described by a bipolar teenage girl on lithium: "How can I tell them I LIKE being high? ...I feel dull. I feel robbed of my creativity. I feel robbed of who I am, or rather who I was" (7). From a slightly different perspective, is society better off with these artists and writers medicated? Psychiatist Joseph J. Schildkraut of Harvard Medical School studied the lives of 15 artists in the mid-1900’s; at least four had committed suicide (8). Even with these casualties, Schildkraut maintains, "Yet depression in the artist may be of adaptive value to society at large" (8). How would the literary world have changed without the mad genius of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald? Is it fair to allow a writer or artist to sacrifice their emotional stability or even their lives for the creation of new art? Where do we draw these lines between the public and the private good?"
This is why I don't deal with bullshit Psychology. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1675
I LIKE being high too. The lows -are worth it-. I work with what God gave me.
This conclusion, however, leaves us with a few very pressing questions. These days, the automatic response to a diagnosis of manic-depression is to medicate the patient (3). While doubtless this creates a calmer life for both the patient and those around him or her, it is often doubtful whether the patient leads a happier life while on medication. As is described by a bipolar teenage girl on lithium: "How can I tell them I LIKE being high? ...I feel dull. I feel robbed of my creativity. I feel robbed of who I am, or rather who I was" (7). From a slightly different perspective, is society better off with these artists and writers medicated? Psychiatist Joseph J. Schildkraut of Harvard Medical School studied the lives of 15 artists in the mid-1900’s; at least four had committed suicide (8). Even with these casualties, Schildkraut maintains, "Yet depression in the artist may be of adaptive value to society at large" (8). How would the literary world have changed without the mad genius of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald? Is it fair to allow a writer or artist to sacrifice their emotional stability or even their lives for the creation of new art? Where do we draw these lines between the public and the private good?"
This is why I don't deal with bullshit Psychology. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1675
I LIKE being high too. The lows -are worth it-. I work with what God gave me.
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-05 09:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-05 11:14 pm (UTC)I am who I am...and on top of that the source of how I feel is mostly circumstantial...it may not always be like this, or at least I hope it isn't.
I really do believe that eventually the winter that has been my life for so long will end, and I'll actually see something in stark contrast to what I've seen.