Abstract
Surprising to some, this exploration is about health—an everyday creative (compensatory) advantage found with a family/personal history of certain major psychological disorders. The advantage goes to “better functioning” persons. This can be about a “state” or an ongoing “trait.” Here is a delicate nonlinear balance once again, here resulting in an “inverted-U” effect; this isn’t always well understood. Nor do certain research designs bring out the subtleties. Nor do findings on a few creatively eminent individuals necessarily or at all generalize (however important they may be in themselves) to everyone, nor to everyday creativity. Considered are phenomena linked to bipolar and schizophrenia spectra of disorders, for individuals and families. Implications could improve the lives, literally, of millions of people.
… the creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person
Frank X. Barron
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Notes
- 1.
Goodwin and Jamison , Manic-Depressive Illness, 2nd Edition; See Richards, “When Illness Yields Creativity,” 491. If 5% of the population shows some variant of mood disorder with a bipolar family history (adding, in addition, “spectrum” disorders and “normal relatives ” showing subclinical effects) a large segment of the population may be involved.
- 2.
Goleman, “A New Index Illuminates the Creative Life.”
- 3.
Jamison , 1993, Touched With Fire, 29.
- 4.
Kinney and Matthysse , “Genetic Transmission of Schizophrenia.”
- 5.
Richards, Kinney , Benet, and Merzel, “Assessing Everyday Creativity”; Kinney , Richards, Southam, “Everyday Creativity, Its Assessment, and The Lifetime Creativity Scales.” (Actual scales are included.)
- 6.
Richards et al., “Creativity in Manic-Depressives, Cyclothymes, Their Normal Relatives, and Control Subjects”; also Richards et al., “Everyday Creativity and Bipolar and Unipolar Affective Disorders.”
- 7.
Kinney , Richards, et al., “Creativity in Offspring of Schizophrenics and Controls”; see also special issue commentary, Richards, “Creativity and the Schizophrenia Spectrum: More and More Interesting.”
- 8.
Goodwin and Jamison , Manic Depressive and Depressive Illness; Runco and Richards, eds. Eminent Creativity, Everyday Creativity, and Health.
- 9.
Richards and Kinney , “Mood Swings and Creativity,”
- 10.
Goodwin and Jamison , Manic-Depressive Illness, 1st Edition.
- 11.
Richards, “Relations Between Creativity and Psychopathology”; Jamison , in Runco and Richards, editors, “Mood Disorders and Patterns of Creativity in British Artists and Writers,” 24.
- 12.
Richards, “When Illness Yields Creativity”; Jamison , Touched With Fire.
- 13.
Goodwin and Jamison , Manic-Depressive Illness; Becker, “A Socio-Historical Overview of the Creativity-Psychopathology Connection,” 5.
- 14.
Richards, “Relations Between Creativity and Psychopathology.”
- 15.
Richards, Ibid., Richards, “When Illness Yields Creativity”; Goodwin and Jamison , Manic-Depressive Illness, 1st and 2nd Editions; Jamison , Touched With Fire.
- 16.
Kaufman, editor, Creativity and Mental Illness; Jamison, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire.
- 17.
Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being; Rogers, Creative Connection, Richards, editor, Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature; Kaufman and Gregoire, Wired to Create; Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein, Sparks of Genius.
- 18.
Jamison , Robert Lowell.
- 19.
Kinney and Richards, “Creativity as ‘Compensatory Advantage.’”
- 20.
Runco and Richards, editors, Eminent Creativity, Everyday Creativity, and Health; Ludwig, Price of Greatness; Ludwig, “Creative Achievement and Psychopathology.”
- 21.
Silvia and Kaufman, “Creativity and Mental Illness.”
- 22.
Richards, Kinney , et al., “Assessing Everyday Creativity”; Kinney , Richards, Southam, “Everyday Creativity, Its Assessment, and The Lifetime Creativity Scales.
- 23.
Forgeard et al., “Bringing the Whole Universe to Order: Creativity, Healing, and Posttraumatic Growth.”
- 24.
Barron, Creative Person and Creative Process, 54.
- 25.
Ibid., 73.
- 26.
Beghetto, “Creativity in the Classroom”; Richards, “Everyday Creativity in the Classroom.”
- 27.
Spender, Women of Ideas.
- 28.
Richards, “Relations Between Creativity and Psychopathology.”
- 29.
Ibid.: see also Richards, “When Illness Yields Creativity,” 505, for association with chaos theory.
- 30.
Kaufman and Gregoire, Wired to Create; Carson, “The Shared Vulnerability Model”; Richards, “Everyday Creativity,” 201.
- 31.
Richards, Ibid.
- 32.
Kinney and Richards, “Creativity as ‘Compensatory Advantage,’” 303.
- 33.
Ibid., 304.
- 34.
Richards, “Everyday Creativity,” 200, a five-part typology.
- 35.
Carson, “Shared Vulnerability Model,” 265.
- 36.
Richards, Kinney , et al., “Everyday Creativity and Bipolar and Unipolar Affective Disorder.”
- 37.
Goodwin and Jamison , Manic-Depressive Illness, 2nd Edition.
- 38.
See Silvia, “Creativity in Undefinable, Controllable, and Everywhere.” Happily Silvia and colleagues are interested in an everyday ecology of creativity and use of ecological sampling and assessment methods in creativity research.
- 39.
Kinney and Richards, “Creativity as ‘Compensatory Advantage.’”
- 40.
Richards, “Creative Alchemy”; Richards and Goslin-Jones, “Everyday Creativity.”
- 41.
Richards, “Relations Between Creativity and Psychopathology.”
- 42.
Kinney and Richards, “Creativity as ‘Compensatory Advantage,’” 311.
- 43.
Jamison , Robert Lowell.
- 44.
Swain and Swain, “Nonlinearity in Creativity and Mental Illness,” 139.
- 45.
Moore, The Developing Genome, 15.
- 46.
Stigma is a concern of Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter and her Mental Health Task Force. Journalistic fellowhips have been awarded to professionals helping disseminate important and accurate information, and are helpingange the culture. www.cartercenter.org/health/mental_health/fellowships.
- 47.
Richards, “Everyday Creativity: Our Hidden Potential”; also Richards, “Arts and Self-Expression in Mental Health,” Conversations Series, Carter Presidential Center, March, 2004, with broadcast on Georgia Public Radio.
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Richards, R. (2018). Creative (Compensatory) Advantage. In: Everyday Creativity and the Healthy Mind. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55766-7_13
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