*articles:**
Are
Creativity
and Mental Illness Linked? "All poets
are
mad," asserted English writer Robert Burton in his 1621 book, The
Anatomy
of Melancholy. Burton was exaggerating, of course. However, many people
do believe that artists are more likely than others to be mentally ill.
Many well-known artists, writers and musicians had a history of mental
illness..."
Art
Museum of
the Mind Two articles on artists who have had psychiatric problems.
Depression
and
Creativity by Douglas Eby
Eccentricity
and Creativity by Douglas Eby
intensity
/ sensitivity quotes etc on ideas of "excitabilities" in work
of
Kazimierz
Dabrowski, and concept of highly sensitive people.
Hollywood
Balancing Act by Lynell George
Far from the spotlight, the
industry
is rich in personal stories of how to deal with extreme anxiety and the
obsession to make it.
Misdiagnosis
of the Gifted by Lynne Azpeitia, M.A. and Mary Rocamora, M.A.
"Gifted individuals face many challenges. One of them
may
be in getting correctly identified by psychotherapists and others as
gifted."
Moods
and the
muse by Bruce Bower [SCIENCE
NEWS]
On
the
Fringes
of the Bell Curve, the Evolving Quest for Normality [NY
Times]
"science and medicine, along with legal systems and states, shape our
notions
of who and what we are, who is sick and who is well... normal and
abnormal"
Shhh,
Mad Genius at Work by Scarlet Cheng "It's a very
difficult
thing to depict the artistic process on film. ... Americans tend to see
artists as mad geniuses like Van Gogh or as fools and shysters. It's
very
rare that you see Hollywood transcend those stereotypes."
Stanford
Researchers Establish Link Between Creative Genius and Mental Illness
"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."
Successful
Artist,
Architect Turns His Dyslexia Into a Wellspring of Creativity
[Associated Press] "Success: Encouraged by a kind
great-great-uncle
and by Frank Lloyd Wright himself, Bennett Strahan views his condition
as a gift"
>
interview: Paula
Caplan, PhD - author: "They Say You're Crazy..." - she is
formerly
a consultant to those
who
construct the DSM - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders - and talks about some of
the
major problems with the manual.
***books:
Nancy C.
Andreasen Brave
New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome
Nancy C.
Andreasen,
MD. The
Broken Brain : The Biological Revolution in Psychiatry
"...
a guide to the new scientific understanding of schizophrenia, severe
depression,
and other major mental disorders and to the new medications that have
already
returned hundreds of thousands to more normal lives. Dr. Andreasen's
book
is also a social manifesto that seeks to remove the shame, guilt, and
punishment
that are still attached to the mentally ill..."
Mary B.
Ballou,
Laura S. Brown. Rethinking
Mental Health and Disorder
This
book makes visible how feminists have raised the awareness of mental
healthcare
providers and consumers in a number of significant ways. For example
feminists
have pointed out that psychological research data is often generalized
from study samples that are too small to be statistically significant,
that conclusions based on research conducted on males (such as in the
area
of personality or moral development) often aren't true of women, that
the
observed phenomenology of so-called mental illnesses in men have been
used
to develop diagnostic criteria that are biased against women, and that
some treatment methods -- such as a male therapist's masculine
dialogical
style -- may be counter-productive to women in therapy. In other words,
feminism has brought to light the fact that gender differences produce
a greater complexity in the human condition than male mental healthcare
professionals have been willing to acknowledge. One other important
point
made by feminism that is especially relevant to mental healthcare is
that
the medical model of mental illnesses may be unjustified in the
majority
of cases because it is unscientific.
from
review by Peter B. Raabe Ph.D. [Metapsychology Online mentalhelp.net] -
author of Issues
in Philosophical Counseling
Judith
Bemis,
Amr Barrada Embracing
the Fear: Learning to Manage Anxiety and Panic Attacks
[from
The WomanSource Catalog & Review: Tools for Connecting the
Community
for Women; review by Patricia Pettijohn:] "Nothing to fear but fear
itself?
For anyone who has ever suffered from the palm sweating, heart
pounding,
trembling, panting, exhausting terror of anxiety or panic attacks, that
is more than enough. This book, authored by two recovering
agoraphobics,
offers strategies for managing anxieties and phobias, emphasizing the
need
to first accept our anxiety and panic, encouraging us to take risks,
and
giving specific dialogues to counter fearful self-talk."
Paula
Caplan,
PhD. They
Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists
Decide
Who's Normal
Phyllis
Chesler Women
and Madness
[from
The WomanSource Catalog & Review:] "The single most important work
on women and mental "health" and "illness," this book has
revolutionized
psychiatry since its publication in 1972. It is not an exaggeration to
say that Phyllis Chesler gave birth to what is now known as feminist
therapy
through her analysis of how patriarchy shapes our definitions of
madness,
and of how psychiatry is used as a form of social control. What she
shows
is that women are defined as mad when they deviate from sex role
stereotyping;
that sex, class, race and marital status affect the likelihood of a
woman
being diagnosed as mad, and further determine her actual diagnosis or
"type"
of madness."
Patty
Duke. A
Brilliant Madness
Beate
Hermelin. Bright
Splinters of the Mind: A Personal Story of Research with Autistic
Savants
"Drawing
on 20 years of research... describes not just what autistics savant do,
but explains how they do it. During her studies she and her
collaborators
examined savants alongside neurotypical individuals talented in the
same
domain, as well as people with the same level of intelligence as the
savants
but with no special abilities. ... describes the nature of the talents
of savants who are gifted at poetry, foreign language acquisition, the
visual arts, music, and calendar and numerical calculations... it is
also
a book which reaches radical conclusions on the very nature of talent
and
its relationship to intelligence." [Amazon.com review]
Kay
Redfield
Jamison. Touched
With Fire - Manic Depressive Illnes & the Artistic Temperament
Susanna
Kaysen. Girl,
Interrupted (basis
of film
starring Winona Ryder; Angelina Jolie; Whoopi Goldberg; etc) //
from the book: "The more I thought about it, the more absurd it became.
I couldn't take all those rules seriously... I was the one person who
had
trouble with the rules. Everybody else accepted them. Was this a mark
of
my madness?... Was I crazy or was I right? In 1967, this was a hard
question
to answer. Even twenty-five years later, it's a hard question to
answer."
Diane
Klein. In
The Name of Help : A Novel Exposing Psychiatric Abuse
[excerpt:]
"More medication was administered immediately to calm her down. More
consultations
with doctors were held, to sort out the differing opinions. These were
followed by a diagnosis of terms: paranoid schizophrenia, dementia
praecox,
-- words, meaningless words.... More questions, more observation, more
discussion, more theories. Then, still more medication, and a marked
degeneration
of both her level of awareness and her self-determined will .... Less
sanity
.... But, they always told Cathryn that they were going to help her..."
Susan
Kolodny The
Captive Muse : On Creativity and Its Inhibition
[Publisher:]
"Challenging the view that making art is typically linked to
psychopathology,
she demonstrates how our internal conflicts interfere with rather than
foster creative work. She explains the resistances that crop up along
he
way and the inner voices by which artists and writers are encouraged or
beset. She shows how who we are helps to determine what happens when we
revise and how the stages of psychological development contribute to an
eventual ability or inability to do creative work. She quotes from
interviews
with six productive artists and writers who speak candidly about their
work, then points out instructive differences between the unimpeded and
those who become blocked or stalled."
Arnold
M. Ludwig,
MD. The
Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy
John M. MacGregor. Henry
Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal
Sylvia
Nasar A
Beautiful Mind : A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of
the
Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994 - who continues to be challenged by
recurring
schizophrenia.
Daniel
Nettle. Strong
Imagination : Madness, Creativity and Human Nature
Dennis
Palumbo Writing
from the Inside Out
"The
traditional stereotypcial view is, 'Oh, my neuroses cause my writing,
so
if I cure my neuroses, I won't write anymore.' But my experience is:
There
is no cure. It's a mistake to think that there is some perfectable you
in the future freed of conflict and problems. And if that happens, you
won't write anymore. The conflicts and sensitivities that drive a
person
to write are with us forever. They're what make us who we are, and
they're
what make us writers."
Barry
Panter. Creativity
& Madness : Psychological Studies of Art & Artists
"Dr.
Barry Panter, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, has put together with
his
fellow editors an engaging collection of transcribed lectures on art
and
artists. In most cases, the mental health professionals analyzing these
artists (e.g., Jackson Pollock, van Gogh) take rather a reductionistic,
Freudian stance on the sources of creativity. This is to me the book's
drawback, along with the limitation of space--and therefore,
depth--allowed
each contributor. Nevertheless, there are some excellent articles here,
and I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the
psychology
of creativity and its close connection to madness, or--to put it more
clinically--psychopathology."
[review
by Dr. Stephen Diamond, author of Anger,
Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence,
Evil,
and Creativity]
James
Phillips,
James Morley. Imagination
and Its Pathologies
From
John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding to the most recent
edition
of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, madness
has
been viewed as a faulty mix of ideas by a deranged and violent
imagination.
This book shows that the relation of the imagination to pathological
phenomena
is as diverse and complex as the human condition itself. The
imagination
has the power not only to react to the world but to recreate it. And
that
power is double-edged: it is as destructive as it is creative. Recent
advances
in genetics and neuroscience have reinforced the empiricist approach in
psychiatry, to the neglect of subjective aspects of the pathological
experience.
This book argues that the study of the imagination and pathology is
long
overdue, and that such an integration will be both theoretically and
clinically
fruitful. Because imagination can be creatively integrative as well as
pathological, the book emphasizes the holistic, therapeutic dimension
of
imagination as well as its destructive effects. The areas discussed
include
philosophical perspectives on pathological imagination; pathological
imagination
and the psychodynamic tradition; and specific cases of pathological
imagination
in schizophrenia, juvenile pathology, artistic creativity (Vaslav
Nijinsky),
and religious expression (St. Anthony). [Amazon.com
summary]
Jerilyn
Ross Triumph
over Fear : A Book of Help and Hope for People With Anxiety, Panic
Attacks, and Phobias
| Creativity
and Madness: New Findings and
Old
Stereotypes - by Albert Rothenberg
Rothenberg
concludes that high-level creativity transcends the usual modes of
logical
thought -- and may even superficially resemble psychosis. But he also
discovers
that all types of creative thinking generally occur in a rational and
conscious
frame of mind, not in a mystically altered or transformed state. Far
from
being the source -- or price -- of creativity, psychosis and other
forms
of mental illness are actually hindrances to creative work.[from
back cover]
|
 |
Adrian
Wells. Emotional
Disorders and Metacognition: Innovative Cognitive Therapy
[Book
News review:] "Helps to develop an understanding of the internal rules
and processes that guide thinking, and the factors that lead
individuals
to become trapped in cycles of negative and distorted thought.
Addresses
limitations of cognitive theories and describes how metacognition,
self-attentional
processes, and worry/rumination strategies are central to emotional
vulnerability,
the maintenance of trauma-related stress reactions, and to emotional
disorders."
Elizabeth
Wurtzel. Prozac
Nation : Young and Depressed in America : A Memoir
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