BACKGROUND: Anecdotal and biographical reports suggest that bipolar disorder may be associated with high IQ or creativity, but evidence for any such connection is weak. AIMS: To investigate possible associations between scholastic achievement and later bipolar disorder, using prospective data, in a whole-population cohort study. METHOD: Using individual school grades from all individuals finishing compulsory schooling in Sweden between 1988 and 1997, we tested associations between scholastic achievement at age 15-16 and hospital admission for psychosis between ages 17 and 31, adjusting for potential confounders. RESULTS: Individuals with excellent school performance had a nearly fourfold increased risk of later bipolar disorder compared with those with average grades (hazard ratio HR = 3.79, 95% CI 2.11-6.82). This association appeared to be confined to males. Students with the poorest grades were also at moderately increased risk of bipolar disorder (HR = 1.86, 95% CI 1.06-3.28). CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide support for the hypothesis that exceptional intellectual ability is associated with bipolar disorder.It appears that the association is real. Perhaps real genius in the arts requires some combination of high IQ and emotional instability, the latter present in varying degrees. Too manic depressive or not high enough IQ, and no works of genius result, but the right combination and you scale the heights of Olympus.
The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, by Tom Dardis, chronicles the link between the writing and drinking careers of four American writers, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and O'Neill, all of whom were alcoholics. Since alcohol can be a form of self-medication, perhaps depression was a motivation behind their drinking. (Hemingway of course killed himself, evidence of depression.) Interestingly, O'Neill was the only one who quit drinking and who then went on to write his most important works, while the creativity of the others deteriorated over time due to their alcoholism.
I don't remember much about Hemingway's stuff - I've not read any since adolescence. But I do remember that it reeked of the bogus. Whether that correlates with booze, IQ or madness I could not say.
ReplyDeleteHans J Eysenck documented the causal relationship between Creative genius and 'psychoticism' - proneness to psychotic disorders (and a partial form of the associative mode of thinking) in his excellent book Genius.
ReplyDeleteAlcohol produces a similar effect on thinking - a partial delirium.
In brief: psychotic thinking fluently generates a wide range of ideas and increases creativity, high intelligence then evaluates and sorts these ideas.
BTW: Bipolar Disorder is a corrupted diagnostic category created by Big Pharma for the purpose of marketing patented drugs which are labeled as 'mood stabilizers' (mostly assorted anti-epileptic drugs and the horrible, damaging, worthless 'atypical antipsychotics')
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/200904/bipolar-disorder-and-its-biomythology-interview-david-healy
Charles Bukowski is a writer who has risen to posthumous prominence entirely due to the facts of his circumstances rather than any evidence that may be contained in his ouvre.
ReplyDeleteBorn into poverty - check
Violent and abusive father - check
Physical disfigurement - check
Unstable mentally - check
Irremediable alcoholism - check
Unimaginative - check
Wallowing in self pity - check
Our literati guardians can only conclude, "Why, look here, a man who meets all our criteria! He must be good. Let's promote him."
Returning to Bukowski is like returning to your own vomit. No sustenance and no insight other than the regurgitated consumption of an eternal grudge against the world. No wonder his gravestone, at his behest, reads "Don't Try". I wish he didn't...try to write that is.
Edgar Allan Poe on the other hand, I could return to him any day any time and still be awed at his output despite his madness and alcoholism. America's greatest writer imo.
And Damon Runyon, I have no idea whether he was an alcoholic or a depressive but for love of his subject, that is his fellow man, and the ability to make you laugh or cry, there's none better in the American pantheon of literature.
But such is the way of the modern world, we look for the social metrics, the politics, of the writer himself rather than the quality of their output and their ability to inspire new worlds of imagination.
Pat Hannagan
m4monologue
@ “BTW: Bipolar Disorder is a corrupted diagnostic category created by Big Pharma for the purpose of marketing...”
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. I spent five years of my life researching psychiatry in the US, the UK (including a one-year Open University course) and Mexico. The result is a huge e-book in Spanish authored by me (for a taste of the flavor of my POV in English click here).
By the way, in these times of crazy attacks by Scientologists on psychiatry, many secular (i.e., non-Scientologist) critics of psychiatry add disclaimers (as I do) to avoid confusion with the Hubbard cranks. (Legit criticism of psychiatry dates back to the 18th century, with an article by none other than Daniel Defoe.)
As to whether melancholy (to avoid Big Pharma terms) is related to high IQ, this is something that people have noted long ago. The best book on the subject that I’ve read is Solitude by psychiatrist Anthony Storr.
But Storr misses the crux: Alice Miller’s discoveries and her psycho-biographies about some geniuses. I have quite a few notes on it if you are interested to discuss it.
Wiki has this to say of Runyon: "A heavy drinker as a young man, he seems to have quit the bottle soon after arriving in New York, after his drinking nearly cost him the courtship of the woman who became his first wife, Ellen Egan. He remained a heavy smoker."
ReplyDeleteIt also notes one of my favourite quotes and rules to live by of Runyon's: "One of his paraphrases from a well-known line in Ecclesiastes ran: "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's how the smart money bets."
Pat Hannagan
m4monologue
Bipolar Disorder is a corrupted diagnostic category created by Big Pharma for the purpose of marketing patented drugs which are labeled as 'mood stabilizers' (mostly assorted anti-epileptic drugs and the horrible, damaging, worthless 'atypical antipsychotics')
ReplyDeleteInteresting, but I thought treatment by lithium preceded modern anti-psychotics and anti-depressants by quite a while. Lithium compounds themselves had several medicinal and condiment uses prior to that.
There is a book called States of Mind by Roberta Conlan. It has 8 chapters by 8 elite scientists.
ReplyDeleteOne of them is about the connection between creativity and mania.
The book goes through family trees and diaries of many of the prominent writers of the 19th century and gives overwhelming evidence that many of them were manic.
Up to a point, mania increases creativity, verbal fluency, and productivity; it also makes people feel good about themselves.
When the mania increases to hypermania, self-esteem shoots through the roof. People in this state have run down the street and proclaimed themselves to be invincible. In this state, the mind quickly generates even more ideas than in the manic state, but they are not very good.
In hypomania, people become depressed and often attempt to commit suicide.
You can find it on Google books if you're interested. The relevant pages are in the 70s.
My observation of my extremely creative son who was ADHK as a child and still exhibits some traits of it, is that creative people do not make as firm associations when learning as most people do. As a consequence their thinking roams far wider with many times greater associations of disparate ideas--to me one of the hallmarks of creativity.
ReplyDeleteCreative people that I have known also tend to exercise less control over their emotions. They are quick to react and never question the appropriateness of the reaction. They also have a tendency to consider their emotional catagories as more valid than their logical ones.
It is apparently a fine line between great creativity and disfunctional mental states.
@ “Interesting, but I thought treatment by lithium preceded modern anti-psychotics and anti-depressants by quite a while. Lithium compounds themselves had several medicinal and condiment uses prior to that.”
ReplyDeleteIt preceded it because lithium is an element: a pure chemical substance consisting of one type of atom.
In the trauma model of mental disorders advanced by Miller, pathological maniacs are people who suffered from childhood and/or adolescent trauma at home; people willing to escape from trauma into wild euphoria. It’s a fuzzy concept. Some exceptional people would be diagnosed as maniacs even if their creative work is the by-product of a sane mind.
Psychiatrists consider the sluggishness effect that lithium produces as “therapeutic,” but the truth is that the cost of taking it is brain dysfunction.
According to psychiatrist Peter Breggin lithium can cause hypothyroidism, cardiac arrhythmias, weight gain, stomach discomfort and diarrhea, severe acne, hair loss, and serious disorders of the kidneys. “It can cause serious, life-threatening toxicity of the brain” (Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Drugs, p. 75).
I for one wouldn’t treat “sane” or “ill” maniacs with a pure chemical substance. Evidence that family therapy improves the recovery rate and reduce hospital stays of manic-depressive patients was presented by Dr Gabor Keitner (NYT, 1997, p. B11).
Thought provoking links from BGC and Chechar and of course Mangan's post itself.
ReplyDeleteI wonder at how much of those mental illnesses under the broad banner of "anxiety disorders" are in fact part of the natural course of human life.
What was ascribed to a religious sensation of the soul, or as Chechar's link referenced Romain Roland who expressed it to Freud as,
But I would have liked to see you make an analysis of the spontaneous religious sentiment or, more exactly, of the religious sensation which is (...) the simple and direct fact of the sensation of the eternal (which can very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible boundaries, and like oceanic).
,would now be medicated with drugs.
Surely some of the greatest progenitors of change for the better, like St Francis of Assisi, or great writers like John Bunyan were obviously suffering from what we would today call an "anxiety disorder". Is it a disorder or a period of metamorphosis?
The Jesuit saying, "show me the boy at 7 and I will show you the man" may be right but there are more periods to life than that. Observation will tell you that. From 7 to 18 the personality seems fixed though intelligence increases, but there's usually some change at roughly 18 so that from 18 to 30 again is a new man. Somewhere after 30 is the "mid-life" crisis, which in the past, though still a cause of great worry and consternation, not medicated and those able to fumble their way through usually made it with the gift of greater insight.
This is not a plea that madness is to be encouraged but rather that our lives were not meant to be lived as machines from pay packet to pay packet, forever driving ourselves on to "work for a living". The natural life, for all observable history, is one of ebbs and flows, peaks and troughs, the rarity being the man who remained forever in personality cast in stone, and from birth to death toiling at the same cloth unwearied, without some sudden epiphany for change.
William James wrote about these various stages of religious expression in his great work The Varieties of Religious Experience. The chapters on The Sick Soul and The Healthy Soul getting to the polar's of what we would call bi-polar personality.
I'd reckon that what most people require rather than drugs is what the Judge in Chesterton's "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown" in sentencing a man for a crime of passion, recommended:
"I sentence you to three years' imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and God-given conviction, that what you require is three months at the seaside."
But of course our lives on the factory line cannot take that much needed break so instead we soldier on with our drugs to assist us on our daily "productions".
For a lot of people that Judges other piece of advice to the Prime Minister they would be wise to heed:
"Get a new soul. That thing's not fit for a dog. Get a new soul.
Of course Chesterton self medicated with several glasses of Burgundy every night has he wrote.
I've got a case of Cooper's waiting, after a few English Brown Ales so, goodnight Yanks may you sleep the slumber of a drunk and, cheers!
Pat Hannagan
m4monologue
Hemingway was sick with cancer, he decided to end his life. Whether he had, perhaps understandably, "depression" is totally irrelevant. Take a look at Thomas Szasz'z Fatal Freedom and The Myth of Mental Illness for a discussion of how "problems in living" have been twisted into "medical conditions" for which that year's fashionable drugs are dispensed (with a doctors imprimateur). Sometimes these drugs are administered involuntarily for the "patients good".
ReplyDeleteBut hail thou Goddess, sage and holy,
ReplyDeleteHail divinest Melancholy
Whose Saintly visage is too bright
To hit the Sense of human sight
@ Pat and Anonymous,
Wasn’t Milton’s influence on the Romantics what made us see melancholy as divine? But of course, there are cases of melancholy’s antithesis, euphoria, run amok: a genuine mental disorder unrelated with Edison-like overwork or artistic creativeness. Pace Szasz (I’ve read ten of his books) I would say that a purely humanistic approach on psychoses cannot account for major depression or severe manic episodes. That’s why I believe that Alice Miller is a sort of Galileo in the trauma models of mental disorders.
Although I wrote a whole book introducing the reader to the thought of Miller (in Spanish), I also wrote an article in English inspired by her: my opinion on Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis.
I have suffered from severe episodic unipolar depression for 20 years.
ReplyDeleteI experience my depression as profoundly biological; it is as if a switch has flipped in my brain that turns off normal operation, and starts "depressed mode."
Nothing stops one of my depressive episodes better than lithium; for me, the difference between madness and sanity is three pills a day for about three days.
I reject both the idea that depression and bipolar would go away if we would just eschew chemicals for talk therapy, as well as the idea that depression and bipolar have a political philosophy-we are talking about neurology here, and politics has nothing useful to say.
Chechar, from empirical analysis of my own life, I have to agree that high IQ is correlated with 'melancholy'. At least this is valid for me and a couple of other friends I have that are fairly intelligent. Actually, I'm sort of insane since I go from euphoria to melancholy fairly easily. But again, my emotions are a mess. :P
ReplyDeleteAnon,
ReplyDeleteYou have been brainwashed by Big Pharma’s propaganda. There are no biomarkers that, in lab conditions, can demonstrate that depression is caused by a deficit of serotonin. None at all. The reason why psychiatry—which purportedly deals with conditions like depression—is separated from neurology is precisely because no biomarkers have been found for the major disorders listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. The reason you feel well after taking a licit drug is exactly the same reason why people feel better after taking an illicit drug. In both cases the cure is skin-deep superficial since the real etiology remains untouched.
Want to know the real cause of melancholy? Read my book reviews of Andrew Solomon’s silly bestseller on depression, here.
Returning to Bukowski is like returning to your own vomit. No sustenance and no insight other than the regurgitated consumption of an eternal grudge against the world. No wonder his gravestone, at his behest, reads "Don't Try". I wish he didn't...try to write that is.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading Bukowski. Bukowski obviously had such an affect on Pat Hannagan that he was driven to write the prose above - that must tell the readers something. Yet, surely, books don't have to be all motivational do they? They can be windows looking into the dark and depraved worlds of others and still be masterpieces. I can appreciate that the above is Pat's personal opinion but one of the things that stops me from going truly conservative is the suspicion, that if many of the types that comment here were able to, they would ban the books of Bukowski, Nietzsche, Sade, Dawkins...Darwin.
Chechar, re biomarkers and depression: I agree that serotonin levels are not a biomarker for depression, but others exist. See, e.g., the papers of Michael Maes (link on my sidebar), who has documented numerous biomarkers of depression, many of them related to oxidative stress. In my opinion, at least some cases of depression have physical causes.
ReplyDeleteSome depression is biologically caused? Some??????
ReplyDeleteYou guys are unbelievable. Read some germ theory.
Dennis,
ReplyDeleteNancy Andreasen, the editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry, the most financed and influential journal of psychiatry, recognizes in Brave New Brain, a book published in thus century, that:
* there has not been found any physiological pathology behind mental disorders;
* nor chemical imbalances have been found in those diagnosed with a mental illness;
* nor genes responsible for a mental illness have been found;
* there is no laboratory test that determines who is mentally ill and who is not;
* some mental disorders may have a psychosocial origin.
If what you say were true, Michael Maes would be a big celebrity in the psychiatric profession today. But his name doesn’t appear even in Wikipedia (which only publishes articles about notable people). I no longer subscribe Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry (EHPP), the journal that debunks every bio-reductionist claim in the psychiatric profession. But if psychiatry had already found any of the biomarkers that constantly strives to find, as a specialty it would have disappeared and its body of knowledge merged in neurological science (at least in the case of depression, if Maes’ claims were indeed true).
Anyway, I have emailed a mental health professional who publishes in EHPP and in other professional journals and asked him if he has any info about Maes. The reason I’m skeptical of any biological claim in psychiatry (again, do not confuse psychiatry with neurology) is simple. Let me illustrate it with the iconic case of psychiatric disorder: schizophrenia.
/to be continued...
In 1884 Johann Thudichum, the founder of modern neurochemistry, believed that the cause of insanity were “fermented poisons in the body.” His colleagues dismissed some time later Thudichum’s allegation. Subsequently, throughout the twentieth century the most diverse and mutually exclusive claims were proposed as the alleged discovery that caused schizophrenia: from any vitamin, hormone, enzyme imaginable in previous decades to 1950 to, later, exotic substances and neurotransmitters such as serotonin, taraxeine, ceruloplasmin and endorphin adrenaline-adrenochrome. The neurotransmitter that is currently fashionable as the “scientific discovery” that causes schizophrenia is dopamine.
ReplyDeleteThe truth is that each new generation of physicians and psychiatrists has become disillusioned with the “findings” of their predecessors since the passage of time showed that the substances and neurotransmitters mentioned above did not cause madness. This is something that many psychiatrists are well aware of.
Nonetheless, it never occurs to them that all of this medical search that has more than a hundred years is a futile search (and look instead in the trauma model) because a market of billions of dollars is worth of a little self-deception. In my book (in Spanish) linked above I quote Loren Mosher, a previous headperson of the NIMH. Mosher stated that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) could not survive without the support of the multinational pharmaceutical companies (i.e., incredibly, the APA and Big Pharma are business partners).
What’s more, psychiatry is the only profession that uses its failures to justify more millions in subsidies, and so far it has gotten away with it.
Unless real scientists wake up and expel the pseudos from the universities, biopsychiatry will continue indefinitely. But the sad truth is that in recent decades psychiatrists have announced each “discovery” (“discoveries” like those of Maes) with great fanfare in the media. People sleeping in the Matrix have been implanted with the idea that psychiatry has been discovering that mental disorders are biological in nature. Never mind that each of the biological theories of schizophrenia mentioned above have been abandoned: the damage in the public mind has already been done. Who remembers hearing in the media that, after lengthy investigations on ceruloplasmin, “it is not the substance that causes schizophrenia, as it was until recently believed”?
What the Big Pharma airs to the four winds is only what promotes the bio-reductionist faith.
@ “Some depression is biologically caused? Some?????? You guys are unbelievable. Read some germ theory. - Anon
Anon, if germs caused depression, the latest edition of the DSM, published by the APA, would say so in plain English.
Quite the opposite AngloAmerikan, it's people like Dawkins who go about trying to ban the works of others. The man wants to criminalise religion and yet you use him as an example of what my type would like to ban?!
ReplyDeleteWhere on earth did you get the impression I want to ban books anyway?
They can be windows looking into the dark and depraved worlds of others and still be masterpieces. Of course they can as Poe has shown and I recommended.
Not Bukowski however. My mate, all those years ago, who recommended Bukowski to me is now completely insane and, I don't mean melancholic, I mean psychotic. I'm not attributing the cause of his disease to Bukowski but, when one reads Bukowski, one is certainly convinced that it takes that type of diseased mind to appreciate Bukowski. I'm not saying you are of his type but that my mates love for Bukowski and his degeneration fits.
But, that's just my opinion. If I should ever want to read about the joys of child rape then there will always be Bukowski waiting for me. I don't think that day will ever come, happily.
Pat Hannagan
m4monologue
I can appreciate that the above is Pat's personal opinion but one of the things that stops me from going truly conservative is the suspicion, that if many of the types that comment here were able to, they would ban the books of Bukowski, Nietzsche, Sade, Dawkins...Darwin. - AngloAmerikan
ReplyDeleteI wish I knew more about what you meant ... has someone suggested book banning, or is this an ineffable hunch?
I personally consider Darwin and Nietzsche both important underpinnings of (different aspects of) the right. Dawkins is important for making evolution understandable. De Sade is interesting as an underpinning of leftist thinking about sexuality (i.e. "Rules against certain types of sexual activity should be torn down because I said so.") And I don't know Bukowski from Burgertime.
Some depression is biologically caused? Some??????
You guys are unbelievable. Read some germ theory.
If anyone can translate for Anonymous, let me know. Someone believe all depression is caused by bacteria, and that this is completely obvious?
My guess is that Anon. read Mangan's last comment as "some cases of depression cause underlying physical problems that perpetuate the depression" and that Anon. thinks that all of them do. Anon. may be right, but it still doesn't mean all depression has physical causes.
Where on earth did you get the impression I want to ban books anyway? Pat Hannagan
ReplyDeleteI wish I knew more about what you meant ... has someone suggested book banning, or is this an ineffable hunch? B Lode
In my defense I did write that it was my "suspicion" that book banning was on the agenda, so, yes, an ineffable hunch. What I am trying to say is that white nationalism or right wing conservatism has, for me, elements of oppressiveness that I fear will seek to crush my free spirit. Individualism trumps race survival for most modern men. How do we overcome this obstacle?
We overcome this obstacle through ideological discipline. When someone suggests book banning we read them out of the movement.
ReplyDeleteEasier said than done, I know. Not really possible to get any discipline around a set of ideas we can't all agree on. Too much ideological noise in the form of arguments over Israel & abortion.
AngloAmerikan, this is why I keep saying that having the children of a modern white men is a stupid idea. It's like wanting to have the children of a guy who prefers to buy a sports car than save for the tuition of his children, since the first is a good thing for him individually. Actually, if I judge from an individualistic point of view, marrying a guy so that I divorce and take his money and all that neat stuff, not having kids and indulging in my impulses would be the right thing to do. And yes, if you look at the problems of white people, they come from individualism. It's funny, but your arguments are the same as the ones that feminists have.
ReplyDeleteStill, if push will eventually come to shove, you'll have to choose a side.
I recommend Kay Redfield Jamison's book 'Touched With Fire' for some interesting commentary on the connections between manic-depression and genius.
ReplyDeleteI would say Redfield Jamison vs Alice Miller re. Virginia Woolf was unambiguously conclusive. Guess who wins the neo-con tea shirt.
ReplyDelete