There are other tales. Virginia Woolf walking into a river with her pockets full of stones declaring she could not live with ‘going mad again’. Robert Schumann dying in an insane asylum following multiple suicide attempts. Of course, association with a variety of drugs also comes into play. Poor Brett Whitely – how good might be have been……? Whitely for one wrote of ‘selling his soul’ via heroin to ‘pull it all up quicker’. In end it killed him in a motel in rural Australia. Obviously insane.
The desire to qualify art or at least couch it in terms that suggests the abnormal, has been around for a century or more and largely the media is to blame. A good story is a good story. A salacious story even better. Basquiat, dead at twenty seven – the penalty for rising above his station as a street artist. The pity of it is that the story often gets there ahead of the art.
But is there more to the story? Since Plato’s time, it has been assumed that madness goes hand in hand with creative genius. The symptoms of depression and its destructive force we now recognise as part the price of inspiration. That moment of heightened awareness that grips all artists, however fleeting and transitory, is something we all await and all dread. Unless you can take advantage of it immediately, it will be gone forever and even then there is no guarantee that the artistic result will even approximate the moment of inspiration.
A Scientific American article on depression amongst artists talked about artists and writers being up to twenty times more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder and ten times more likely to suffer from depression as the average man or woman in the street. One per cent of the general population is bipolar but seven studies over the past thirty years have found rates of bipolar between 5% and 40% in artists with writers reaching as high as 70%. The rate among artists in the case of major depression is about 5% compared to the general and writers take the prize with rates between 15% and 50%.
Artists are also eighteen times more likely to suicide than the general population as a result of their desire to find meaning in life. Apparently, the general population don’t ask such questions which is probably why they live longer.
So why is depression so common among artists? One clinical observation is that manic-depressives in their high or manic state think faster and associate more freely. Manic people need less sleep, have high energy levels, noteworthy focus and an inflated sense of self-belief, all of which may add to the production of original work. And what of all of those artists who spend their days wallowing in self-doubt? They’re not mad, just depressed it seems. That’s what you get for asking questions in the first place. It’s a form of punishment. Ask questions and expect the worst. Don’t think, don’t create and don’t express opinions – that’s the safe route to personal survival.
What does it say about the general population if it feels the need to either condemn art or lionise the artist as a primary response? What’s interesting is that the creative forces that define our humanity are celebrated in history books via the monuments we leave behind but the artists who created them are either anonymous, written up as social deviants or classified as mad. Proust was on the side of artists. He saw art as the only saviour of a shallow, unthinking society that saw inflated importance in social convention and gossip. Has anything really changed?