Read on to discover if there is a link between mental illness and creativity...
The 'mad genius'... a cliché centuries in the making
'No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.’ That was the view of Aristotle. It’s a powerful idea that has travelled down the ages. Tales of creative artists who have experienced mental illness are hardwired into western culture. ‘I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process,’ proclaimed Vincent Van Gogh, a quote that has been turned into a thousand internet memes. Look online and you’ll find quotes offering variations on the ‘mad genius’ theme aplenty, whether they’re words from Virginia Woolf (‘Madness is terrific, I can assure you … in its lava, I still find most of the things I wrote about’) or John Lennon (‘I can’t be mad because nobody’s put me away; therefore I’m a genius.’).
Many composers experienced mental health problems
When it comes to classical music, the image of the suffering artist has stuck, too. In part, because it seems, on the surface at least, that there are dozens of historical composers who experienced a range of mental health issues. A brief, non-exhaustive sample gives us: alcoholism (Mussorgsky, Sibelius, Weelkes, Schubert), depression (Rossini, Monteverdi, Debussy), bipolar disorder (Robert Schumann), schizophrenia (Gurney), OCD (Bruckner), eating disorders (Handel), phobias (Schoenberg).
Personal biography is often mapped onto music. It’s an easy hook for marketing departments, programme note writers and, dare I say it, journalists. We imagine the struggles and triumphs in Beethoven’s symphonies as a mirror for his deafness. We write off (or at least, people have in the past) Schumann’s late works as the inferior product of an unstable mind. Undeniably, people have found the ‘mad genius’ narrative alluring – and it even feels as if there’s a certain logic to it. Creative thinking, after all, demands the mind to think freely and roam widely, to be unconventional and to see the familiar world afresh. But look beyond it, and what do we find? What really is the connection between creativity and mental illness?
Creativity and mental illness... does science have the answers?
Perhaps, you’d think, we could turn to the scientists for answers, but the results are not that simple. A few years ago, Claudia Hammond, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind, summarised the situation in a BBC article: ‘There’s remarkably little good data on the topic.’ A review of 29 studies into the links between creativity and mental health issues found that 15 of them showed there was no link, nine found a link, while five thought the relationship was unclear. In other words, the jury’s out.
That said, brain imaging and genetic studies are opening new lines of inquiry. Plus, researchers are digging into the nuances of the subject, particularly when it comes to understanding the interactions between creativity and neurodivergence. One study in 2020 published in Cognitive Processing, for instance, found that people with autism had a strong and early preference for music, and that some autistic traits were well suited to musical creativity. ADHD psychiatrist Dr Ulrich Müller-Sedgwick recently discussed Mozart’s neurodivergent traits in this magazine’s pages and is also exploring how current understanding of neurodivergence could illuminate our knowledge of Mahler and Bruckner’s creativity.
Creativity and mental illness... are we in danger of romanticising the 'mad genius'?
If there’s no definitive scientific answer yet about a possible link between creativity and mental illness, examining the anecdotal basis of the ‘tortured artist’ trope itself immediately casts it in doubt. Suggesting that suffering is the true source of great art romanticises mental illness. Yet if we turn to the historical record, to the very same composers who are held up as examples of ‘mad geniuses’, we can immediately see that the opposite is also true. Schumann tried to drown himself in the Rhine, and although he was saved, he spent his last two years in an asylum, unable to compose another note. Sibelius’s depression heralded his descent into musical silence in the last three decades of his life.
Gender stereotypes
The idea is also, arguably, gendered. Male composers are allowed to be geniuses, and therefore tortured geniuses. Women are not. Historically, if women had mental health issues, they were more likely to have been written off as ‘hysterical’. Sometimes it went even further. The psychiatrist husband (later ex-husband) of the 20th-century Australian composer Margaret Sutherland believed (erroneously, needless to say) that her love of composing was itself a symptom of mental illness.
Creativity and mental illness... a harmful myth?
American composer, Julia Adolphe
In an age when discussions around mental health are opening up, and more support and successful treatments are available, it’s clearer than ever that the myth of the tortured artist can be actively harmful. Take the American composer Julia Adolphe, whose music has been performed by the likes of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and LA Philharmonic. She has generalised anxiety disorder, and now finds medication and therapy help manage her symptoms. But at first, she was worried being treated would affect her creativity.
‘One of the reasons I resisted in the beginning was because I’d have these frenzied nights of furious writing. Because I had procrastinated for so long, I had to just buckle down and write for nine hours,’ she says. ‘I didn’t feel good doing it, but I would be very happy with what I had composed. Also, I was writing about my anxiety: my Viola Concerto is very much about that.’ Adolphe falsely believed the anxiety was helping her to write – and that it was her main subject matter, she says. ‘But at a certain point the anxiety was so high I wasn’t getting into the room to write.’ Now, she has accepted her anxiety, and that ‘it affects every aspect of my life’. It is, she says, ‘manageable – and I can still thrive and have a career’.
Things Musicians Don't Talk About
It is a view echoed by Rebecca Toal, trumpeter and, alongside Hattie Butterworth, one half of the presenting duo behind the podcast Things Musicians Don’t Talk About. ‘People love to say you can use your mental illness for good and put it into your music,’ says Toal. ‘I don’t think we listen to people in the moment they’re suffering. We don’t allow them to have space to suffer and be in the darkness. We want to put a positive spin on things, and that’s a lot of what the “tortured artist” is: [the idea] there’s a strength in having mental illness if you can make a product out of it. There was nothing about being mentally ill that improved me as a musician.’
Is music an outlet for mental health issues?
So, if we’ve busted the myth of the tortured artist, where does that leave the possible connection between creativity and mental health? ‘The only connection I really see is this idea of extreme sensitivity. I am very sensitive in all aspects of my life. I understand that my sensitivity – to light, sound, colour, texture – makes me a powerful artist, and I see that as an asset,’ says Adolphe. ‘In my personal life it’s a little more complicated. I’m easily triggered, and the anxiety swoops in. I can get overstimulated if it’s too noisy. So it’s not that my anxiety makes me a better artist, but rather my sensitivity.’
It’s a topic that the Things Musicians Don’t Talk About hosts have thought about a lot too. ‘I think it’s very hard to see which is the chicken and which is the egg,’ says Butterworth. ‘Do people come towards music because they’re trying to find an outlet for their mental health problems, or are those problems caused by the industry?’ Whichever comes first, the set-up for musical life can often cause stress that may exacerbate mental health issues. For composers, that might be the precarious and competitive state of freelance life, time spent alone or the challenges of juggling multiple jobs to make ends meet. The UK Musicians’ Census by Help Musicians and the Musicians’ Union in 2023 found that 30 per cent of professional musicians in the UK experienced poor mental wellbeing. Surveys like this cast light on the scale of the issue.
Creativity and mental health... there's much more work to be done
But even if mental illness is being destigmatised as a topic, Toal believes there’s much more work to be done by the music industry to make it a healthier place: ‘Mental health has become a buzz phrase that has almost become meaningless. No matter how much counselling provision you have, it doesn’t change the landscape. It’s a sticking plaster.’ Misogyny and sexual assault are still rife in music, she points out. While our mental health is individual, we are shaped by the world around us.
The connection between creativity and mental health is a complex one. But when Adolphe set up her LooseLeaf NoteBook podcast to dig into it further, one unifying message did emerge. ‘It was fascinating to hear how different everyone’s experiences are. But it comes down to the same thing, which is that when we are engaged in a healthy creative process, we feel better.’ A powerful truth, and one that deserves to be remembered down the ages.
