Wednesday, October 17, 2012

creativity 'linked' to mental illness

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If everyone is crazy, anxious, depressed or otherwise out-of-synch to one degree or another, can the designator "nuts" any longer find a foothold?

Against what definition of the word "sane" is the word "insane" placed?

Virginia Woolf killed herself
A BBC article suggests that creativity carries with it a greater potential for mental disease. "Creativity 'closely entwined with mental illness'" the headline reads.

Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, the Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute found.
They were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves.
This strikes me as being about as interesting as saying, "elephants tend to have trunks." What's the point? People, creative and otherwise, are as dysfunctional as they are. If the dysfunction proves too much, they may go to a doctor or kill themselves. Is there some way to 'cure' creativity or a lack of it? Maybe there is. Another pill bottle in the medicine chest or another surreptitious white-powder sale on some scuzzy street corner or in some up-scale lawyer's office.

How do you cure an elephant's trunk ... or despair of it either? 

What is newsworthy about an elephant's trunk?
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