Positive Mood, Mental Illness and Creativity
Mood-creativity research reveals that people are most creative when they are in a positive mood and that mental illnesses such as depression or schizophrenia actually decrease creativity. People who have worked in the field of arts throughout the history have had problems with poverty, persecution, social alienation, psychological trauma, substance abuse, high stress and other such environmental factors which are associated with developing and perhaps causing mental illness. It is thus likely that when creativity itself is associated with positive moods, happiness, and mental health, pursuing a career in the arts may bring problems with stressful environment and income. Other factors such as the centuries-old stereotype of the suffering of a "mad artist" help to fuel the link by putting expectations on how an artist should act. It also helps the field to be more attractive to those with mental illness.
Read more about this topic: Creativity And Mental Illness
Famous quotes containing the words positive, mental, illness and/or creativity:
“Property is the fruit of labor—property is desirable—is a positive good in the world.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about....”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient?”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are “prefabricated” in the sense that we don’t coin new ones every time we speak.”
—David Lodge (b. 1935)