What is the link between creativity and Mental Illness?
My paper Neural Sensitivity Model proposes a model to link these two concepts.
Creativity and mental illness are often connected to each other. Going as far back as Aristotle, the link between madness and genius has seems to us something akin to a colloquial truth, but, what is going on in the brain? This page asks a question: what is the link between creativity and mental illness.
Let us suppose for a moment that these two ideas *are* linked. How might that change the way that we look at the human organism and how we might address supporting individuals? If creativity is connected to mental illness...how does that change our view of mental illness? What might it mean to be "creative?" How might it change our assumptions about religion, science, art, and personality? What theological questions does it present to us...and what personal questions does it present?
The research on creativity in the brain indicates the harmonious interplay and integration of the three networks associated with complex cognition in the brain. Here, I want to dive into what I believe to be one of the central perspective shifts that such research might yield. Psychology often works from disorder...yet what is its concept of "order"? What does it mean to mentally "mature" as a human? Is there a normative process of development? A final point of "integration?" We know much about the mentally "ill" person - where is the mentally "healthy" person? What is the image of "mental health?" And, could it be possible, like with diseases, that a healthy mind, like a healthy body, is not one that has never encountered illness...but, gone through it?
Some more unknown psychologists have written about the idea of a person that is mentally healthy. Arasteh wrote a book called *Final Integration* in which he wrote about psychological praxis from the perspective of the "integrated" individual, or, "universal" man. If we are to think about a concept of mental health, must we not have some concept of health? From where can we derive this? For Arasteh, others, and my self, religion, particularly the great prophets of religions, holds insight into this. The Sufis have an idea of the "Perfect Man," the Eastern faiths have similar concepts, and, in the Western, we have the image of the perfected man in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
I am of the view that creativity is the means and method through which greater psychological development and maturity occurs. The means and methods of this are quite complex and varied, and rather than some basic methodology of health, a creative viewpoint reckons with the reality that the individual is a member of the world, an incarnated soul among other humans, and as such, his personal integration is intimately linked with his relations with others, and, in the self-application of consciousness, on himself. We are creatures that have the ability to transform the world around us...but also, the world within. We have transformed the world around us a hundred times over, but, we have time and time again failed to transform the world within us. Man is a creature that is impacted both without and within, and more importantly, a creature that can gain agency over how he is impacted both without and within.
“We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature [...]. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.” ― Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man
The musings on this page form just a basic entry into some questions that this concept brings up, and I will be editing and adding more as time goes on. For now, as I continue to curate content that presents information in a consumable manner, it suffices for the reader to merely reflect on the ideas of "illness" and "health" in terms of the mind, and, more importantly, what it may look like for an individual to be, that is, become, healthy. That is, what it might look like for you.