Creativity And Psychopathology

The relationship between creativity and psychopathology has been a subject of interest for over a hundred years. Already in his time, Aristotle noticed that great scientists and artists, highly creative people, tended to melancholy. Figures such as Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent Van Gogh or Edvard Munch suffered from mental disorders that affected their creative process.

Even today, the study of the relationship between creativity and psychopathology remains difficult and complex. First of all, because to find this relationship, it is necessary to find a scientific and formal method to measure something so intangible, for many, as creativity.

Second, because mental disorders are multiple and highly variable, and as they say in the clinical setting “there are as many psychoses as there are people”. And this brings us to the third reason that justifies the difficulty in measuring this relationship. And although the advances in neuroscience are remarkable, the world of the psyche still seems to be unknown.

The study on the relationship between creativity and psychopathology

As a starting point, we can say that the study of the relationship between creativity and psychopathology began after the seventeenth century . That is, after accepting that the first variable could become the object of measurement. In other words, creativity has ceased to be considered an immaterial variable, without the possibility of scientific study.

Authors such as Galton, Silverman or Brain, among others, have stated, starting from a naturalistic perspective, that creativity was not an extraordinary phenomenon, but common and with biological foundations. While this seems obvious today, it was not considered to be so until then. These scholars also noted that highly creative individuals often suffered from depressive, manic-depressive, or neurotic disorders or symptoms.

However, it was soon concluded that this relationship should be studied more rigorously and not just through case studies. Since then, three ways or methods have been defined to study the influence of psychopathology on creativity :

• Through the biographical studies of creative figures in history. However, the results provided by this method are not precise or conclusive, although very interesting.

• Analyzing the psychopathology of creative people through the use of inventories, scales, clinical-metric criteria for people with creative professions. The aim is to verify whether or not there is a higher incidence of mental disorders. And, if so, what typology do they fall into (affective, psychotic, etc.).

• Through the study of creativity in psychiatric patients. This method is based on the opposite principle to the previous one. If in the first one seeks psychopathology in creativity, in this one seeks creativity in psychopathology. However, most of the research has focused on patients with bipolarity or schizophrenia.

What does neuroscience say about this relationship?

In recent decades, numerous neuroscientific studies have been conducted in an attempt to determine a relationship between these two variables.

Although the results are very different – and sometimes even contradictory – they indicate that “ there is a correspondence with mental disorders and / or with obvious behavioral disorders ” (Escobar and Gómez-González, 2006). These studies link creativity with alcoholism, suicide, major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and brain dysfunction deficits (epilepsy, autism, etc.).

However, it must be stressed once again that this relationship is not definitive. At the moment, in fact, there is no clear consensus among the experts. At the neuroanatomical level, creativity is linked, among other things, to the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, responsible for higher cognitive functions.

Just as it is also linked to the limbic system that manages physiological responses to emotional stimuli. However, experts say the solution lies in the flow of information that “flows” through the regions of the brain involved in creativity.

It can therefore be concluded that, although there is still a long way to go, creativity is involved in mental disorders in which the structures just mentioned are altered. Despite this, mental disorders are not a determining or sufficient factor to be creative.