MDDA-BOSTON LECTURE SERIES

BIPOLAR DISORDER AND CREATIVITY
Highlights of a lecture by Frances Frankenburg, M.D.
Associate Director, Adult Development Lab and Chief of Inpatient Psychiatry, Bedford VAMC
Wednesday, January 26, 2000

Dr. Frankenberg has spent considerable time looking at the issue of mental illness and creativity, and pointed out that there has been a long-standing interest in the link between creativity and psychiatric disorders. Back in time, for example, people thought that creative people weren’t normal.

In framing her topic, Dr. Frankenberg pointed out that creativity is the ability to come up with something that makes sense to other people. Creativity can be manifested in lots of ways besides being a great painter or writer: it can come out in how you play with your kids, make new rules for games, or lots of other ways. Creative people have to be brave, persistent, skillful and organized.

Review of Recent Studies

Dr. Frankenberg talked about the work of Leonard Heston, who looked at schizophrenic moms in Oregon. Five of 47 kids of schizophrenic mothers who gave them up at birth had the illness. An unexpected result of the study, however, was that lots of the other kids had great music talent.

A second study conducted in Denmark again looked at adoptees. This study also found that the kids were more creative if they came from families with psychiatric disorders. Thirty percent of the kids had psychiatric disorders, and an additional 30 percent had parents with psychiatric disorders.

Another study in Iceland looked at patients of the country’s sole psychiatric hospital. Again they found more creative Icelanders in the families of the psychiatric patients.

Nancy Andreasson conducted a study focused on 30 successful creative writers. A full 80 percent had depressive disorders and 43 percent had bipolar disorder. Two-thirds of the group had received treatment, and two ultimately committed suicide.

Ruth Richards did a study looking at the Danish population and everyday creativity. She found that those with no creative inklings had no connections to people with psychiatric disorders or connections to people with severe bipolar illness. She pointed out that when people are really manic, they make up things that don’t make sense to people. Moderate illness was found to be associated with creativity, as was hypomania.

Creativity and Bipolar Disorder

Dr. Frankenberg pointed out that research is turning from the relationship between creativity and mental illness in general to the specific relationship with bipolar disorder. Lots of bipolars are concerned that taking lithium stifles their creativity, but Dr. Frankenberg presented a study of bipolar artists that were asked how their creativity fared now that they were taking lithium. One-third said their creativity was great, one-third noticed no difference, and the remaining one-third thought it had suffered. When another study asked untreated bipolars to generate words associated with the word “Liberty,” they were found to generate more words than people on Lithium but fewer of their words were pertinent to the topic.

Dr. Frankenberg pointed out that it’s better to take lithium than to run the higher risk of suicide, which creativity won’t help with, among untreated bipolars. She also pointed out that the conventional thinking is that Depakote will show better results than Lithium regarding impact on creativity.

Dr. Frankenberg recommended the book Touched By Fire for those interested in further reading on this topic. Purchase the book now by going to the MDDA Bookstore.

This lecture summary is provided as a service to MDDA members as well as our friends and supporters. Please consider donating to MDDA or becoming a member to assist us in providing continued information about affective disorders and their treatment.

Email or Contact us at 617-855-2795
Our Office Hours: Tues-Wed-Thurs, 11:00 am - 4:00 pm
Hotline services are available through other organizations

PO Box 102. 115 Mill Street. Belmont, MA 02478. Fax: 617-855-3666
Last Update: November 27, 2005

To contact webmaster click here