Post 6: Genius and Mad

Hieronymous Bosch, Vincent Van Gogh, Edgar Allan Poe... What do these people have in common? Brilliance and possible insanity. There are many artists, musicians, writers, scientists and criminal minds that have been blessed with genius and also touched with madness.

Vincent van Gough was a gifted painter and committed suicide. Albert Einstein (eccentric and socially unconventional) and Isaac Newton (paranoid) have been associated with cases of schizophrenia. And think of the countless rock stars brimming with talent who have either done themselves in with the same guns they sing about or done themselves up with the same drugs they warn against.

What cruel part of fate is responsible for the pairing of the traits of talent with the predisposition to depression?

Is it the fame?
1) It must be frustrating to be an artist with without the distinction of genius. Many genii have gone unrecognized because society is simply “not that into” whatever their strong suits happen to be. To know that you possess talent and still aren’t able to sell must be maddening.

2) And once a genius has been discovered, he must undoubtedly feel pressure from a society that always expects great things of him. After years and years of writing and drawing, the only poem that earned Edgar Allan Poe renown during his lifetime was “The Raven,” about his dying wife. (And there’s definitely some deficiency in logic in that one. Talking birds?) After that, society took notice of him, and things spiraled down. Poe became an alcoholic, suffered hallucination, and died four years later, never writing quite so well.

Maybe it’s just plain, old depression.
It’s not law that an artist has to go crazy while creating art. Why can’t a person just be crazy, and then create art?

Call it the tortured artist effect, but creativity actually flows rather well from depression. Damien Rice, an Irish songwriter, may well fall under this category. Deep, introspective songs with heartbreaking honesty would never mean as much as they do if the writer were an extremely satisfied person at peace. Rice’s melancholy is the key (now this is personal opinion) to his creativity. Referring to “Grey Room,” which is about Rice’s songwriting process, the gloom of his grey room (which is a state of mind) brings him his colorful words. Dr. Jamison Kay supports the idea that melancholia permits emotions to flow properly:

"The fiery aspects of thought and feeling that initially compel the artistic voyage - fierce energy, high mood, and quick intelligence, a sense of the visionary and the grand, a restless and feverish temperament - commonly carry with them the capacity for vastly darker moods, grimmer energies, and, occasionally, bouts of 'madness.'"

Jamison, Kay. Touched with Fire:
Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. 1993. McMan's Depression
and Bipolar Web. 10 Feb. 2008. 3 Mar. 2009 .

Or is it the money?
Though he was a talented writer, Stephen Crane never made enough money to live comfortably with his common-law wife Cora. More than once Crane (1871-1900) was forced to write novels that he didn’t particularly like in order to generate cash for his family. His stories like Maggie, a Girl of the Streets: a Story of New York (1893) failed, not because they lacked literarily, but because the realism was too grim and depressing for audiences’ taste. But if Crane felt moved enough to feel that he could change society’s perspective and order to write about poor, the impoverished, or Maggie, a prostitute—who were the editors to censor, and who were the publishers to reject?

When you have something brilliant, you can’t swallow it. No matter how bizarre the unibrow, Frida Kahlo had to express the pain of her life-changing bus accident in 1925 in a way unique to her. Have you ever listened to a Nirvana album? Kurt Cobain (arguably one of the most iconic alternative rock musicians) was something amazing; yet it took more than just a little self-doubt to put a gun to his skull. No, the creativity is innate. Whether it comes out in a burst of madness or as a result of madness, genius mustn’t be stifled.


Interested in the thoughts of a madman? Creativity and madness from Van Gough’s perspective.