Writer's Block Case Studies

Hello everyone! This is LaVel Moorehead: writer, reader, and book blogger extraordinaire. I wanted to write about additional information on Writer's Block and on another writer's block case study. This was conducted in Britain where researchers examined 47 female writers. Tomorrow, I will post additional comments concerning this study and the past three studies that I looked at. Are you ready? All righty. Here are the notes from the powerpoint "Creativity and Psychopathology" that I found from the Harvard Website! :-)

Writer’s Block Case Study Notes:

Creative genius has been associated with three
types of psychopathology:
mood disorders
psychosis and psychosis-proneness
alcohol/drug abuse
(and sometimes OCD)

List of Artists with these kinds of disorders (or suspected to have had them):

Michelangelo
Vincent van Gogh
Cezanne
Shelley
Keats
Lord Byron
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Hemingway
Herman Hesse
Tchaikovsky
Wagner
Schumann
Edgar Allan Poe
Dostoevsky
Tolstoy
Faulkner
Nietzche
William James
Isaac Newton
Nikola Tesla
Virginia Woolf
Sylvia Plath
Anne Sexton
John Forbes Nash
Charles Parker
Jackson Pollock
Kurt Cobain

Romantic Period
• music, literature, art focused on emotional
rather than intellectual content
• importance of mysticism, dreams, supernatural
• creativity associated with nonrational process
• best work at the border of sanity/insanity
• The Proud Badge of Affliction
Romantic poets embodied the concept of the
“troubled spirit” and creativity

“Mood Disorders and Patterns of Creativity
in British Writers and Artists”
Kay Redfield Jamison Purpose: - to ascertain rates of treatment for affective illness
in a sample of eminent British writers and artists
- to examine seasonal patterns of moods and productivity
- to inquire into the role of very intense moods in writers’
and artists’ work (1989)
Sample: 47 British Commonwealth artists and writers
who had won high medals or awards
Findings
• 16% poets treated for bipolar illness
• 55% poets treated for a mood disorder
• 62% playwrights treated for a mood disorder
• periods of high creative productivity roughly
corresponded with hypomanic mood
• 60% of subjects felt that moods were integral
and necessary or very important to their creativity