by Ron Powers
What is it, then, about schizotypy that links it to creativity—and from there to mental illness?
The social psychologist Susan K. Perry has written that “looseness and the ability to cross mental boundaries are aspects of both schizophrenic thinking and creative thinking.”5 The point, or circumstances, at or under which schizotypy transforms into full-blown schizophrenia or bipolar disorder—which it resembles in milder form—is yet to be discovered. Yet the notion of a “spectrum” supports the views of Eugen Bleuler, who believed that no clear line separated “sane” and “insane” behavior.
If true—and the distinguished Claridge claims strong experimental and clinical evidence—the implications are enormous and revisive. They would overturn, for instance, the long-held doctrine that schizophrenia can originate only from a genetic flaw, though damaging external, environmental factors must stimulate it to form the dreaded disease. No, says Claridge: schizotypy reveals that everyone is born with the potential for schizophrenia. The potential may be actualized into mental illness, depending on circumstances. Or it may result in enhanced creativity, or even spiritual ecstasy.
Other researchers have gone so far as to propose that schizophrenia is more than a tragic risk for creative people: Its persistence in the gene pool is essential. It is there “because of shared genetic linkages to creativity.”
This is the view of a paper published in 2014 as a chapter in the book Creativity and Mental Illness.6 Its authors, a five-person team of PhDs specializing in psychiatric research, report that 103 studies in recent years suggest a genetic connection between creativity and psychosis. “Moreover, schizotypal thinking is often viewed as sharing features with creative thought, such as cognitive flexibility and divergent thinking via unusual but meaningful associations. These commonalities, coupled with the observed heritability of both constructs, suggest that there may be genetic factors common to both creativity and schizophrenia.”
A fearless and profound early-modern searcher into the dark wilderness where madness and creativity might be found intertwined was Carl Jung. Jung held a lifelong fascination for thought and images that lay beyond the restrictive borders erected by his former mentor and later antagonist Sigmund Freud. He believed that without an unfettered immersion in them, the mind would forever keep its secrets locked, and human awareness would remain only partial, stunted at best. His explorations included Eastern religions with their lavish and often terrifying imagery; an “unconscious” universally shared and stocked with bizarre totems of human experience; devils; gods; tricksters; the mother; the child; the shadow.
Jung, in part at least, was coursing through the mind via the vehicle of art.
“In order to do justice to a work of art,” he wrote in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, “analytical psychology must rid itself entirely of medical prejudice; for a work of art is not a disease, and consequently requires a different approach from the medical one.”7 A doctor’s aim, he continued, is to pull disease out by its roots, but a psychologist must take the opposite point of view: he must inquire into the work’s meaning, irrespective of an individual artist’s intentions. Perhaps the artist in his conception was more like Icarus, privileged and damned to fly too close to the source of all light, risking, even sacrificing his life in exchange for a glimpse of infinite truth.
I think of Kevin reaching for and becoming one with his guitar.
Relatively few people have the opportunity to compare the temperament and goals of an actual scientist with the lurid fantasies just described. I am one of the lucky few. Honoree fits the mold of the actual, working scientist far better than any white-coated cinematic eccentric who throws a switch and screams, “It’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!” After earning her PhD in 1975 at the University of Chicago, Honoree developed a line of investigation into a largely unanswered central question in cell biology that surrounds the roughly seven trillion cells in the human body, containing nearly identical genomes: How is it that they differentiate into so many different cell types, such as muscle, blood, nerve, and skin cells? At this writing, forty years later, she at last is well along in synthesizing and organizing her notes, papers, and six hundred-odd cell photographs into a sophisticated, unified consummation of her patient, painstaking work, which has broadened quietly but considerably. I have yet to hear her scream “Eureka!” or see her dash from the house with a beaker of mysterious boiling gases; and I will assert that academic science-department Christmas parties are a lot more convivial and laced with good conversation than are the Christmas parties thrown by English departments, where the celebrants tend to brood.
Conjoined, Janus-like, with the pop-mythological face of the mad scientist is the mad artist. Vincent van Gogh may or may not have sliced off his own right earlobe in 1888—some scholars now believe that the painter Paul Gauguin clipped it with the tip of a sword during an argument. In any case, the injury, and its devastating coda two years later, when Van Gogh fatally shot himself in a wheat field that he was painting, made him an icon of genius-and-death romanticism.
The necrology of renowned artist suicides in the twentieth century reinforced this sentimental view of the Artist as tragically insane: among them, Virginia Woolf walking into the Ouse in 1941, her coat pockets filled with stones; Ernest Hemingway turning a favored shotgun on himself in 1961 (his widow, Mary, insisted that it was an accident); the poet Sylvia Plath gassing herself in 1963 after several failed attempts on her own life; the painter Mark Rothko slashing his wrists in 1970; the poet John Berryman jumping from a bridge in Minnesota in 1972; the grunge guitarist Kurt Cobain shooting himself in 1994; the monologist Spalding Gray leaping from the Staten Island Ferry in 2004.
Curiously, the (mad) scientist and artist are diametric opposites as measured by the goals that damn each as mad: eternal life in the scientist’s typic quest; eternal death for the artist. This is a little counterintuitive when one thinks about it: the scientist (who, after all, is only pursuing what most people crave) is generally assigned the villain’s role in popular morality plays, while the artist (whose madness is confirmed exclusively by her suicide) is generally mourned and venerated—in retrospect, of course.
So: Does neuroscience support the myth of mental illness as a concomitant of high intelligence, scientific genius, artistic creativity? Is madness the price that humans must pay for being exceptional?
Sadly, the answers appear to be yes—but only a dubious and deeply qualified yes, and only to a limited extent. Which is to say, not really. Not conclusively. Certainly not always: the same answers that one encounters at the end of nearly every inquiry into the origins, constituent properties, and cognitive effects of schizophrenia.
Among the most eminent recent investigators who argue that creativity and madness share common origins in the brain are Nancy Coover Andreasen of the University of Iowa; Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and Arnold M. Ludwig, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Kentucky.
Andreasen, unique among neuroscientists, claims expertise in both brain science and the creative arts. After earning a doctorate in literature in 1963, she was appointed to the English department at the University of Iowa as an instructor in Renaissance literature. There, she found herself in close proximity with the faculty and students of the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She grew curious about the mental stability of writers as a class. She reenrolled in the university’s medical school and completed a residency in psychiatry in 1973. Then she plunged into a field she had virtually invented: an empirical investigation into creativity as it might intertwine with mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder.
In 1974 Andreasen and the psychiatrist Arthur Canter, a colleague at the university, copublished a journal paper announcing that creative writers “differed significantly” from a group of fifteen “non–creative control” volunteers when examined for symptoms of psychiatric disorder.8 Their methodology was “a structured interview and specifically
defined diagnostic criteria.” The two researchers found that “seventy-three percent of the writers suffered from some form of psychiatric disorder, as compared with 20 percent of the controls. The most common illness was affective disorder.”
“Affective disorder” might strike the ear as a close relative of schizo-affective disorder, the severest form of schizophrenia. But it is a synonym for “mood disorder,” which in some cases might include bipolarity, a mental illness similar in many of its symptoms to schizophrenia, but which normally does not involve psychosis. As for “some form of psychiatric disorder,” this is self-evidently a catchall term that includes alcoholism and depression, which are not chronic. The very nature of the writing life—isolated, incremental, intense, inherently frustrating as the writer searches for coherence and an elevation of language—can be viewed as an invitation to alcoholism and depression. Those who invest their lives in other art forms may make the same claim.
The Andreasen-Canter study has been criticized for advancing (however unintentionally) a false picture, by drawing upon a small, narrow, homogeneous field, as well as for the compromising ambiguity mentioned above. At least some of their subjects might have been showing signs not of actual mental illness, but of the aforementioned schizotypy. This condition, as the cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman has written, “consists of a constellation of personality traits that are evident in some degree in everyone.”9 It can produce traits similar to those of schizophrenia, as Kaufman points out, including “unusual perceptual experiences, thin mental boundaries between self and other, impulsive nonconformity, and magical beliefs.”
A similar explanation, recently advanced, is that such traits are not signs of mental illness but rather expressions of extreme yet normal human behavior, imposed in part by the very nature of the creative project.
This view is acknowledged by Robert A. Power, a genetic psychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. Yet Power believes that he and his team have discovered a true genetic link. For a period ending in 2015, Power led a group of psychiatric researchers who computed the genetic risk scores in some eighty-six thousand citizens of Iceland for predictors of mental illness. Power concluded, “Our findings suggest that creative people may have a genetic predisposition towards thinking differently which, when combined with harmful biological or environmental factors, could lead to mental illness.”10
The study was conducted in Iceland because it was funded by a genetics company called deCODE, based in Reykjavik. Its CEO, the neurologist Kari Stefansson, echoed Power, claiming that “what we have shown is basically that schizophrenia and creativity share biology.”11
But the Icelandic study, as with the University of Iowa investigation, has been criticized on methodological grounds—and for its underlying assumptions as well. Albert Rothenberg, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, has held it up as an example of “creativity’s” elusiveness as a concept. “The problem is that the criteria for being creative is never anything very creative,” Rothenberg told an interviewer. “Belonging to an artistic society, or working in art or literature, does not prove a person is creative. But the fact is that many people who have mental illness do try to work in jobs that have to do with art and literature, not because they are good at it, but because they’re attracted to it. And that can skew the data.”12
Working in art or literature not only fails to prove madness; it is widely seen as its antidote. “Nearly all mental hospitals use art therapy,” Rothenberg points out, “and so when patients come out, many are attracted to artistic positions and artistic pursuits.”13
The enduring power of the “mad” stereotypes over people’s perceptions suggests that certain anxieties might be at play, anxieties that may not spring exclusively from fear of mental illness, and yet exert tremendous inhibiting influence upon society’s ways of dealing with it. An important generator of these anxieties might be our friend the Other.
The alienation scientists experience is strikingly at odds with their centrality in creating the dynamics of the modern world, dynamics of convenience, health care, and communications, among others, that their detractors tend to take for granted as the natural, given condition of human life. The great naturalist and philosopher Loren Eisley virtually defined the Other in this context when he wrote, “It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.”14
I frankly acknowledge that my lack of expertise in medicine, neuroscience, and even statistical analysis makes me an unreliable narrator in the areas I have attempted to explicate above. The fact that most neuroscientists remain, to a large extent, at odds with one another is cold comfort. Something terrible happened to my sons, and I want to know what and why.
I think, of course, of Kevin and his joyful virtuosity. I think of him near the end of his life, when he was deeply schizo-affective, yet (if yet is the right word) playing with an intensity and abandon—and playfulness—that went almost beyond musicianship. In the autumn of 2004, after a series of psychotic breaks made it clear that he could no longer cope with the demands of living away from home, we secured an enrollment for him at nearby Castleton College, where Honoree was then an associate academic dean, so that he could play with the jazz band. A common exercise for jazz musicians is “trading eights”: a horn player, say, will blow out a series of notes, and another member of the ensemble must immediately answer, note for note. The back-and-forth escalates in speed and complexity. Kevin’s bandmates told us later of watching, transfixed, as Kevin dueled with the instructor, an accomplished saxophonist. As the “stairstepping” of difficulty progressed, Kevin would continue to replicate the notes flawlessly on his guitar, until he grew bored with the drill and began to replicate them in reverse order.
I think of this, and the statistics and correlations begin to dance in front of me.
And I think of Dean, the storyteller who might have been a writer. He seemed always convinced that fabulous realms, peopled with beings very much like himself, stretched just beyond the curve of the mundane earth where he was obliged to live. He wanted to get to those realms. This could seem at times like ordinary petulance, a restless belief that the grass was always greener—somewhere. If he and I were successful at getting a kite into the air (which we rarely were), Dean immediately longed for a larger kite, a higher altitude, stronger winds. If I rounded a curve a bit too fast on one of Vermont’s many country roads, making the car veer a little, Dean, belted into his car seat, would crow: “Let’s do that again!” (And I did it “again,” more times than I care to admit.)
If enhancement of ordinary experience was not available via repetition or a larger kite, Dean could make it available in his mind. He could reach for that fabulous realm and pull it toward him, imposing it upon the mundane.
A couple of years after we’d settled in Middlebury, Dean began to explore the terrain near our neighborhood—largely wildflower meadows and pastures. One day he discovered the remains of an abandoned house foundation. It lay half-buried under weeds and vines at the edge of a rise on the far side of the blacktop road that led into town. It was just an old cracked cement rectangle, fortified by a couple of rusted beams. The spookiness of it grabbed his attention at once, but not in the way it might grab other children’s. For Dean, the remains weren’t spooky enough. They needed some mystery imposed upon them; a few ghosts, maybe. So he summoned the realm. And he asked me if I would enter it with him.
(“I shan’t be gone long,” Robert Frost wrote. “You come, too.”)
It was an enchanting invitation.
He wanted the two of us to write a story about the secret place he’d found. A mystery. I said sure. For several nights that summer we sat together at a table under a lamp in our screened-in back porch. With invisible crickets chirping in the darkness beyond the patio, we tossed around ideas for characters and plot and jotted notes on our yellow legal pads.
Collaborating in a fantasy with one’s child is
a sublime pleasure, rarely given; but in the end it was not fully a collaboration. Nearly all the story is Dean’s. I think he liked me sitting there beside him in the tamed and terrible semidarkness. I think that for both of us it re-created nights already vanished, when Dean and Kevin were both small, and I would lie between them on the top bunk of their beds, an arm around the warmth of each, telling them my improvised stories as they floated to sleep. On the ceiling above us glowed the adhesive moons and stars I had bought at Woolworth’s. The fabulous realm had never seemed closer.
But now Dean had taken over the story—he’d taken over story. He’d fashioned the characters in his tale from himself and a neighborhood pal. And he fashioned those ruins into a realm that might have expanded into the cosmos as he grew older and more adept, had things gone differently.
9
“If Only, If Only, If Only…”
My life was fairly normal before June 12, 1998. I had ordinary friends that I could hang out with and laugh with, and talk to between classes. I was in a clique of friends I guess I would say. I went to regular classes, and some were even advanced for my grade. I was an average student who dreamed about the freedom and journey I would soon discover after high school. I, like many kids had a dream about what senior year would be like. I would be with the kings of the school, I would probably have a steady girlfriend, and I would go to the prom, and graduate with my class another guy with a smile in a black robe. None of this was meant for me.
—The beginning of an essay
by Dean Powers, written on June 25, 1999
