An article from Renee Hopkins Callahan of the IdeaFlow blog links to studies about children of bipolar parents being more creative, and other studies that illustrate enhanced creativity in people with bipolar, and makes some great points in her discussion of them:

Terence Ketter, MD, said he believes “bipolar patients’ creativity stems from their mobilizing energy that results from negative emotion to initiate some sort of solution to their problems. ‘In this case, discontent is the mother of invention,’ he said.”

The researchers also found a link between the length of a bipolar child’s illness and creativity: the longer a child was sick or manic, the lower the creativity score. It makes sense, said Kiki Chang, MD, a study coauthor, that this illness could, over time, erode one’s creativity. ‘After awhile you aren’t able to function and you can’t access your creativity,’ he explained.

It fascinates me because my personal experience has been that there’s sometimes a fine line between creativity and mood states that most professionals would call disordered. The line can be so fine that it’s down to whether the expressions are positive or negative — if positive, call it creativity; if negative, call it personality disorder.

…I also wonder if specific training in creativity skills might help bipolar people whose symptoms don’t currently manifest themselves as the more positive creative traits. Perhaps if they knew what to do with their innate creativity, these folks would be able to live more on the positive than the negative side of creativity.

A good book related to the topic is bipolar psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jameson’s Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.

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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 17 Mar 2006
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