Title: Creativity and mental health - Wikipedia
Headings: Creativity and mental health
Creativity and mental health
Contents
History
Studies
Mood and creativity
Bipolar disorder
Schizophrenia
Arguments that support link
Bipolar disorder
Emotions
Posthumous diagnosis
Positive correlation
Mental illness and divergent thinking
Arguments against a link
Notable individuals
See also
References
External links

Content: A study involving more than one million people, conducted by Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute, reported a number of correlations between creative occupations and mental illnesses. Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, and were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves. Dancers and photographers were also more likely to have bipolar disorder. However, as a broader group, those in the creative professions (defined as "scientific and artistic occupations") were no more likely to experience psychiatric disorders than other people, although they were more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism, the Journal of Psychiatric Research reports. Research in this area is usually constrained to cross-section data-sets. One of the few exceptions is an economic study of the well-being and creative output of three famous music composers over their entire lifetime. The emotional indicators are obtained from letters written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Liszt, and the results indicate that negative emotions had a causal impact on the creative production of the artists studied. Psychological stress has also been found to impede spontaneous creativity. A 2005 study at the Stanford University School of Medicine measured creativity by showing children figures of varying complexity and symmetry and asking whether they like or dislike them. The study showed for the first time that a sample of children who either have or are at high risk for bipolar disorder tend to dislike simple or symmetric symbols more.