rhetoric podcast

The host discusses the phenomenon of artists struggling with mental illness, focusing on the "27 Club" and the struggles of writers like Sylvia Plath. Various studies have explored the connection between creativity and mental illness, with inconclusive results. Female poets, in particular, are more likely to suffer from mental illness. The connection between creativity and mental illness may stem from the emotional nature of creative writing and the ability to express emotions through art. The interviewee believes that there is a connection between creativity, especially creative writing, and mental illness, as it forces individuals to confront their emotions. Poetry, in particular, is seen as a vulnerable genre that often reflects the narrator's own thoughts and struggles, which may explain the link to mental illness. Overall, the relationship between creativity and mental illness remains complex and difficult to determine. Hello, and welcome to Who Knows? I'm your host, Caroline Stickney, and today we're going to talk about the strange tendency for artists to struggle with mental illness. One of the more popular and mystifying theories about this phenomenon lies in the urban legend of the 27 Club. Artists like Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix belong to this group of prominent pop culture figures who've died at age 27 due to drug and alcohol abuse resulting from mental health issues. This theory still mystifies us, and especially me. I think it's a lot about the whole unanswerable chicken-and-the-egg question. Which came first? Were those people drawn to the arts because they struggled, or did they develop those issues because of the demands of art? Granted, these celebrities struggled with a lot more than writers, which is my focus today, because fame and being thrust into the public eye most likely had more to do with their struggles. Still, this phenomenon is seen in those more secretive realms like writing. The most famous of these writers is Sylvia Plath, a pioneer of the confessional poetry style in the 1950s, who struggled with depression her whole life, leading her to commit suicide at the age of 30. But she had an incredible way of pinpointing the most complex feelings. She wrote in her journals, how can I tell them that my happiness streams from having wrenched out a piece of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it into typewritten words on paper? How can they know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feelings, by turning it into print? Her life was dedicated to the search for understanding. Her introspective powers and ability to empathize made her creative in her own eyes, but her ultimate struggle was her fascination with the workings of an individual, herself. This absorption with herself was perhaps an explanation for her immense struggles with mental health, even though this is, ironically, useful for emotional healing. She is so prominent in the question of whether any connections can be made between creativity and mental illness, in fact, that one of the leading researchers in the field, James Kauffman, has dubbed the phenomenon the Sylvia Plath effect. But researching this question is much harder than it seems. First of all, it's incredibly difficult to narrow down what creative behaviors are defined as. Then, mental illness encompasses multiple symptoms and diagnoses, while also indicating the social norms of a particular time, which then changes diagnostic criteria, making the science much too broad to determine a linear relationship to creativity. Many studies that try to establish or disprove that relationship are inconclusive because of this exact reason. But a few studies stand out. One study, conducted by Paul Sylvia and Nathan Kimbrell, examines the relationships between depression, anxiety, and several aspects of creativity through a more pragmatic approach. Creativity was divided into many different measures, such as everyday creative behaviors, creative accomplishments, creative thinking styles, creative beliefs, and creative personality traits. But results were relatively inconclusive. Some aspects of the creative measure correlated with the disorders, and others did not. Overall, though, their analysis took into consideration multiple possibilities. Creative people actively search for unusual or complex things that could promote original and imaginative ways of thinking. Behaviorally, seeking out a reward of this nature is appetitive. However, depression is the lack of appetitive behavior, and anxiety typically inhibits novelty-seeking behavior. The conclusion that could be drawn is that it's not at all shocking that anxiety and depression didn't predict higher levels of creative action. However, another study led by Simon Kiyoka investigated whether creativity, specifically in writers, is connected to all psychiatric disorders or only psychotic disorders, with an emphasis on authors specifically. Inspired by previous research that concluded patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are overrepresented in creative careers, it found that people in creative professions weren't more likely to suffer psychiatric disorders, except for bipolar disorder, but authors were much more likely to suffer from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and to commit suicide. The study I found most concise was done by James Kaufman. As I mentioned before, he is the lead researcher of this field and created the term Sylvia Plath Effect because he was the first to discover that of all creative writers, female poets are most likely to suffer from mental illness. In further research, he focuses on two questions, why poets are more likely to be affected by mental illness, and why female poets are more likely to be affected rather than male poets. He proposes a few ideas. Poetry's nature and style tends to be more introspective and expressive than other forms of literature. So, a reason that it could be appealing for those suffering mental illness is because its freedom of form is based on choice. The structure of more traditional forms is comforting, and the lack of strict form provides more opportunity for expression. But why female poets? When researching this topic, I was a little skeptical because centuries and centuries of sexism, still very much alive today, paint women as hysterical and overly emotional. Is this finding simply because the world still thinks women are inherently crazy and not to be taken seriously? There is a lot more to that claim than I originally thought. Because of those centuries of gender discrimination, career options for women were little to none. Other fields that have been limited to men, like science or medicine, require years of higher education that have historically been barred from women. To be a scientist, you need a lab, supplies, wealth, security clearances, education, and the social freedom to do so. But anyone can pick up a pen, even with the most rudimentary language skills. This is a rare freedom offered to women. Though they couldn't publish under their own names or share their work publicly, they can still write. And as horrible as stereotypes are, sometimes there can be a very small grain of truth that's been misconstrued and used to put people down. Maybe because women are expected to be emotional, and men historically have insisted they are not, women are more drawn to expressing their frustrations and complex understanding of their status in life. Maybe because men are more afraid to express the same human emotions that rule everyone, the unwritten code created by them and men like them, they refrain from expressing that in writing. Maybe because women have been discriminated against and persecuted since the beginning of human history, and women whose creativity guides them to outlets like creative professions, they express their struggles with mental health through writing. Maybe the way poetry forces the writer to reflect on the struggles they have leads to introspection that turns obsessive. But that's enough theories for now. Let's hear what someone else has to say. I'll be interviewing Noah Zabin, a freshman majoring in English and creative writing. She's also a published poet and a Mental Health Initiative board member. Thanks for agreeing to this interview. My first question is very broad, and you can interpret this in any way. Do you think any connections can be made between creativity, especially creative writing and mental illness? I do think that there is a connection between creativity and mental illness, especially creative writing, just because it's such an emotional craft. I think it lends itself to people who are more emotional in general, which does go hand in hand with mental illness. I think a lot of it is based in, you know, a lot of people ignore their mental health issues or, you know, their emotions in general. And I think that creativity and like the arts and especially creative writing, you're forced to kind of face your emotions head on. And I think that that is something that both people with mental illness seek out and benefit from. Do you find poetry specifically to be the most prominent link to mental illness and creativity? I'm not sure if I find poetry to be the most prominent link to mental health issues necessarily. But I do think that it is one of the more emotional genres that one can write. I think that like fiction and especially like sci-fi fantasy can be very rooted in escapism, where with poetry, you are essentially writing about yourself and your own thoughts, even if you aren't. Technically, I think a lot of it has to be rooted in truth in a way that fiction doesn't necessarily need to be. I think that also songwriting and nonfiction writing can also have those elements. But I do think that poetry is very specific in that sense that it is more often than not from the narrator's point of view and therefore more often than not more vulnerable, which I do think goes hand in hand with mental illness. As for my beliefs as to whether or not any connections can be made between creativity and mental illness, I don't know. But to me, there is a beauty in not knowing and in speculation. I like to think that something as important to me as creativity can't be nailed down by scientific terms and that art means something different to every single person. I like thinking that art and destruction, creating and destroying are inexplicably entwined, that art is consistently the most revealing of human thoughts and struggles. I hope that all this information I've thrown at you for part of your day could make you wonder the same thing as me and maybe you made your own sense of this impossible question. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.