Creativity and Mental Illness Confirmed

This article talks about how people with mental illness are in creative professions. “People in creative professions are treated more often for mental illness than the general population, there being a particularly salient connection between writing and schizophrenia.” This is what researchers presented. We have only to look at some famous people who have had schizophrenia one being John Nash. There must be a reason why. They do not say why it happens that people with mental illness are creative in this article.
What the article does say: “Last year, the team showed that artists and scientists were more common amongst families where bipolar disorder and schizophrenia is present, compared to the population at large. They subsequently expanded their study to many more psychiatric diagnoses – such as schizoaffective disorder, depression, anxiety syndrome, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, autism, ADHD, anorexia nervosa and suicide – and to include people in outpatient care rather than exclusively hospital patients.” They included just about all the psychiatric diseases. They also included alcohol and drug abuse patients.
Now we find out how they found the results: “The present study tracked almost 1.2 million patients and their relatives, identified down to second-cousin level. Since all were matched with healthy controls, the study incorporated much of the Swedish population from the most recent decades. All data was anonymized and cannot be linked to any individuals. The results confirmed those of their previous study: certain mental illness – bipolar disorder- is more prevalent in the entire group of people with artistic or scientific professions, such as dancers, researchers, photographers and authors. Authors specifically also were more common among most of the other psychiatric diseases (including schizophrenia, depression, anxiety syndrome and substance abuse) and were almost 50 per cent more likely to commit suicide that the general population.” They are more authors or writers will have schizophrenia or depression and always substance abuse. What can they do with these results?
It explains here: “if one takes the view that certain phenomena associated with the patient’s illness are beneficial, it opens the way for a new approach to treatment, he says. In the case, the doctor and patient must come to an agreement on what is to be treated, and at what cost. In psychiatry and medicine generally there has been a tradition to see the disease in black-and-white terms and to endeavor to treat the patient by removing everything regarded as morbid.” As I read about other schizophrenics on the web they all seem to have negative side effects from the medication. Do they lose their creativity also? I know I am one of the lucky ones in that I can work. I can get up early and keep a sleeping pattern. I do not know what I would do if I was never have gone to college and get a job. I see the negative side effects as really bad when you would like to improve your situation and cannot. You can also check us out at http://mhcd.org/blog