Mental Illness and Creativity

How the mind works? Our culture is full of so much stereotypes about it and may be most of all artists suffer from it. The juxtaposition between genius art masters and their great art works despite their mental illness or because of it has been part of our life for thousands of years. The science has not yet been able to prove it right or disapprove. And while the final verdict is still up to be said we can see how many painting masters actually suffered from mental illnesses - Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Jackson Pollock, Edvard Munch, etc. They had in particular manic-depressive disorder and schizophrenia.
But the question here is - what is most important - illness or Art? Should we instead of trying to eliminate illnesses by medication to try to embrace them as something crucially valuable in their own right?
Actually a link between illness and creativity has been documented and can be traced back to 4th century B.C. People back then call it divine madness provided as a gift from the heaven, like a channel by which we receive the most important information and knowledge. It comes from God.
Even Lord Byron states that all artists of the craft are crazy somehow. Some are really affected by gaiety or melancholy. We are all more or less touched by this gentle emotion to express the inner life vision by shapes and colors.
At one point of the time association between diseases of the mind and artistic creativity and merit was so popular that surprisingly some art workers actually mimic this eccentricity and mind illness in order to be respected for what they do as Art. Such tries of course are far from the blazing glory of the ones really 'touched' by mental illness as blessing to stay genius for centuries and centuries.
First studies in this area focused on simple correlation, looking for evidence that mental illness is much more common among creative people of all sorts. And vise versa - those who are really creative and make art of all kinds are much more predisposed to mental disorders than the rest of just highly intelligent ones. Such studies have provided some persuasive evidences that the connection is real. The biological support evokes the front lobe of the brain, where the temporal and parietal lobes are, where knowledge and concepts are stored. It is minded that unusual activity has been found there with people suffering from all sorts of mental disorders. Hyperactivity might cause a person to draw unusual and seemingly unrelated items, result from delusions and mania.
And it's not hard to see how a mental illness actually affects the artistic creativity. It makes the person think in an original, unique manner, to express amazingly well in this world of no emotions. Thinking of the artistic mind would never be traced properly because it moves in its own paths. It creates all rules and changes them constantly. Because actually movement and change is what makes us creative and alive. Feeling productive make personality valuable not only for the inner self-satisfaction but for the rest of the people as well.

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My name is Alexandra Duhlinska. I'm doing Art for fun and living and I hope that you like my very useful and interesting articles. If you need to contact me, do it here - http://artdux.com/. Thank you for being supportive! Giving me your time for reading my articles, makes me really happy and satisfied with what I do! Keep in touch with me for more great article topics here! Thank you!

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