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Mental Illness & Creativity

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5/21/02

MEDIA CONTACT: Michelle Brandt at (650) 723-0272
(mbrandt@...)
BROADCAST MEDIA: M.A. Malone at (650) 723-6912
(mamalone@...)

STANFORD RESEARCHERS ESTABLISH LINK BETWEEN CREATIVE
GENIUS AND MENTAL ILLNESS

STANFORD, Calif. - For decades, scientists have known
that eminently creative individuals have a much higher
rate of manic depression, or bipolar disorder, than
does the general population. But few controlled
studies have been done to build the link between
mental illness and creativity. Now, Stanford
researchers Connie Strong and Terence Ketter, MD, have
taken the first steps toward exploring the
relationship.

Using personality and temperament tests, they found
healthy artists to be more similar in personality to
individuals with manic depression than to healthy
people in the general population. "My hunch is that
emotional range, having an emotional broadband, is the
bipolar patient's advantage," said Strong. "It isn't
the only thing going on, but something gives people
with manic depression an edge, and I think it's
emotional range."

Strong is a research manager in the Department of
Psychiatry and Behavioral Science's bipolar disorders
clinic and a doctoral candidate at the Pacific
Graduate School. She is presenting preliminary results
during a poster presentation today (May 21) at the
annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association
Meeting in Philadelphia.

The current study is groundbreaking for psychiatric
research in that it used separate control groups made
up of both healthy, creative people and people from
the general population.

Researchers administered standard personality,
temperament and creativity tests to 47 people in the
healthy control group, 48 patients with successfully
treated bipolar disorder and 25 patients successfully
treated for depression. She also tested 32 people in a
healthy, creative control group. This group was
comprised of Stanford graduate students enrolled in
prestigious product design, creative writing and fine
arts programs, including Stegner Fellows in writing,
students in the interdisciplinary Joint Program in
Design from the Department of Mechanical Engineering
and studio arts master's students from the Department
of Art & Art History. All subjects were matched for
age, gender, education and socioeconomic status.

Preliminary analysis showed that people in the control
group and recovered manic depressives were more open
and likely to be moody and neurotic than healthy
controls. Moodiness and neuroticism are part of a
group of characteristics researchers are calling
"negative-affective traits" which also include mild,
nonclinical forms of depression and bipolar disorder.

Though the data are preliminary, they provide a
roadmap for psychiatric researchers looking to solve
the genius/ madness paradox depicted in the movie A
Beautiful Mind, which tells the story of Nobel
Laureate John Nash. The existing data need further
review, Strong said. "And, we need to expand this to
other groups," he said. How mood influences the
performance of artists and genius scientists will be
the subject of future research at Stanford. "We need
to better understand the emotional side of what they
do," Strong said.

The study was funded by grants to Ketter, principal
investigator and associate professor of psychiatry and
behavioral science at Stanford, from the National
Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression,
and Abbott Laboratories.

...................
Stanford University Medical Center integrates
research, medical education and patient care at its
three institutions - Stanford University School of
Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile
Packard Children's Hospital. For more information,
please visit the Web site of the medical center's
Office of News and Public Affairs at
http://mednews.stanford.edu.

Lisa Marie Kuhn
Halifax NS Canada
Wife to William since 2000
Mom to Julia, born 03/15/01
and Kathryn, born 03/01/03
and Carly Rose, born 11/10/04

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