Is Madness the Plight of Creativity? What is Madness?

Vincent Van Gogh, Edgar Allen Poe, Michelangelo and Beethoven would trap themselves in their rooms in mental agony, dealing with an assortment of mental disorders. Is the cost of creative genius suffering? Is there an explanation behind the correlation of mental disorders and creative freedom? According to Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann--researcher of how culture shapes psychological madness--this is a correlation based off of society’s misunderstanding of the reality of madness and how bad it really is; it is no romantic freedom. Luhrmann explains how this misunderstanding came to be, what madness really looks like in all its gore, and why romanticizing it is dangerously insensitive to the reality of it.

Why is it that many do not believe that madness is real and uncontrollable in those who experience it? Most of the reasoning goes back to the 1970’s, when it was “fashionable in intellectual circles to say that madness didn’t really exist at all, that it had been created when society’s quest for order defined some people as deviant,” (Luhrmann 10). As well-admired and influential philosopher Michael Foucoult said, “the true genius of madness could be seen only in the writing of philosophers and poets;” this led to the beginning of the romanticization of mental illness as something chaotically beautiful from the heart of creatives (Luhrmann 11). It was popular to undermine mental illness in this way. Another reason that the reality of madness is undermined is because, as Luhrmann states, “we assume that other people are just like us--normal--until it becomes apparent that they are otherwise,” but as Luhrmann has found as a psychiatrist studying and treating madness, “the landscape of human thought and feeling is more gaunt and jagged but also more breathtaking than most of us...have dreamed of in our little local worlds,” (Luhrmann 5). After studying madness, Luhrmann makes a convincing claim that “madness is real, and it is an act of moral cowardice to treat it as a romantic freedom...these are not romantic illnesses. Nor are they creativity and insight in another form” (Luhrmann 12, 16). She states:

“Most people who end up in a psychiatric hospital are deeply unhappy and seriously disturbed, and many of them lead lives of humiliation and great pain. To try to protect the chronic mentally ill by saying that they are not ill, just different, is a misplaced liberalism of appalling insensitivity to the patients and to the families who struggle so valiantly with the difficulties of their ill family members...it is hard to describe, to someone who has never seen it, how terrible and intractable madness often is” (Luhrmann 12).

Luhrmann tells stories of psychiatric patients dealing with real madness: teenage schizophrenic patient Sylvia Frumkin--an engaging but bizarre girl with a high IQ who dyed her hair and scalp with red mouthwash because she thought she was the mermaid from the old Superman comics, took three showers a day, began asking people to adopt her, and then thought she was going to be kidnapped to England by Paul McCartney. A patient with manic depression, or bipolar disorder, named Kay Jamison who was, when in a manic episode, a successful professor at UCLA, and in a depressive episode overdosed on lithium, bought a gun, and wrote, “I can’t calm this murderous cauldron...in the mirror I see a creature I do not know but must live and share my mind with,” (Luhrmann 16). Madness is real and devastating, and the lack of understanding around it does not help the lives of those who deal with it.

While Luhrmann forces us to take madness as a serious illness, we are still left to reassess the original question: why are so many great artists also “mad?” If madness is not something correlated to creative genius, then why is it so often seen in them? Do high amounts of creativity cause madness, or does madness cause one to turn to creativity as a means to process their internal distress? That is the beauty of art: that it allows an escape to process the pains of life. As a post-professional ballet dancer who saw a great deal of “madness” --- though romanticized it may be --- in my colleagues, directors, choreographers, composers, costume designers, and myself, this is something quite fascinating. While I agree that there is danger in romanticizing mental illness and that real cases of it should not be discredited as creative freedom, I still, as an artist myself, am left romanticizing it. My best art, be it dance or in more recent times, creative writing, has come in times that I felt mad. To quote my own creative writing when having mental distress:

“My pen has been dry, but now I have ink.

Thank god my blood isn’t the color of pink.

Red will do, for passion it adds

Blood is my ink, for times I’ve gone mad.

In heartbreak and upheaval,

My heart is ill

As for today: its blood on my quill.”

A chaotic mind is one of the most beautiful things for an artist, and this often feels and looks like madness. While we hate the distress on our mind, we love the creativity that it ignites. “Madness” can feel addicting for a creative in this way because it provides inspiration to create, however dark it may be. All this to say--I am speaking as an artist who experiences ounces of “crazy” but not psychiatric diagnoses of any form of madness, meaning I am, in fact, the problem Luhrmann is referring to. Regardless, it is hard to stop; as I wrote a few years ago when I was diagnosed with a health condition and was no longer able to dance: “those who do not believe that madness is the dark side of creativity have never experienced the depth of artistry being suffocated inside a mind."

Bethany Ward

Columbia University

Department of English and Comparative Literature