Creativity and Mental Disorder Study

Hello everyone! :-) This is LaVel Moorehead: writer, reader, and book blogger extraordinaire. I am a little tired, but I just had to blog about this study concerning writers and their relationship to mental illness. This, of course, is a controversial topic but something that I want to dig into. There's an assumption that writers have a proclivity to illnesses such as unipolar depression and schizophrenia that the regular population does not. Is this true? Depends on who you ask. Let's look into this one study from researchers at the British College of Psychiatrists. :-D

Title: "Creativity and mental disorder: family study of 300 000 people with severe mental disorder."

By: Simon Kyaga, Paul Lichtenstein, Marcus Boman, Christina Hultman, Niklas Långström and Mikael Landen

Creativity and Mental Disorder: Family Study of 300,000 people with Severe Mental Disorder
-Throughout this article, creative professions denotes the aggregated artistic and scientific occupations, whereas creative occupations is used for creative professions as well as for any of
the subgroups (i.e. artistic, scientific, visual artistic and non-visual artistic) (2)
-study of 300,000 people with mental disorder (2)
-visual artistic = visual artists, photographers, designers, display artists
Non-visual artistic = performing artists, composers & musicians, authors, other literary and artistic work
-NEED TO POST DIAGRAM FROM PG.5!! 

-creativity is associated with mental disorder; Aristotle said: “No great genius has ever existed without a strain of madness.” (2)
-creativity – psychiatric disorder studies in 2 types: interviews and biography analyses
-Lange-Eirchbaum study of 800 people regarded as geniuses published in 1931 (2)
-Conclusion: no definite relationship between high mental capacity and mental illness, but these individuals had increased rates of psychopathology (2)
-increased creativity in 40 American adults with bipolar disorder compared to those using same treatment, 16 (2)
-Study: Swedish citizens, looked at people with Schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, and unipolar disorder (3) from 1973 to 2003
-diagnoses coded by ICD-8, ICD-9, and ICD-10 (3)
-Non-visual artistic occupations: performing artists, authors, composers, musicians, other literary and artistic work
-males (16,342) 63.7% and females (9,298) 36.3%
-median age = 43.6 years, mean age = 45.5 years
Schizophrenia Subgroup (5)
-demonstrated no difference in having creative occupation
-decreased likelihood to hold scientific occupation
-increased occupation of holding artistic occupation
Bi-Polar Subgroup (5)
-increased likelihood of holding creative occupation
Unipolar Depression
-no increased rate in holding creative occupation