Creativity and Mental Health

Why the Brooding Writer Can't Be Sustained

On any list of accomplished creatives—writers, artists, musicians, scientists—there’s bound to be one, or even several, that suffered from mental health issues. Franz Kafka, Vincent Van Gogh, Jonathan Swift, Frida Kahlo, and Ezra Pound are just a few examples of tortured artists that publicly battled mental illness most of their lives. Often these artists credit their fractured mental states with their success, or at the very least, rely on their illnesses as a source of content or inspiration, as Virginia Woolf did, despite taking long hiatuses from writing during her more severe bouts and ending her writing career (and life) at the age of 59.

In her journals, Sylvia Plath, who exhibited symptoms of both bipolarity and schizophrenia, wrote, “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”

It’s a sentiment that I would surmise many creatives can relate to, especially writers. Writing requires a deep e…