What Neuroscience Has To Say About The ‘Tortured Genius’
And while it’s easy enough to believe that pain helped to fuel the work of Kurt Cobain, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace or Alexander McQueen — to name just a few of the brilliant, creative, successful people who took their own lives after battling mental illness — there is also great art that comes from no pain whatsoever.
.. “One in four people annually in this country has a mental illness that impairs their function. That’s pretty common. The illness is pervasive. Genius is much more rare.”
.. Andreasen told HuffPost that she is currently working on an imaging study using fMRI. She emphasized that the idea of the “tortured genius” is oversimplified, and not one she’s pursuing. “People who are highly creative are intrinsically curious, exploratory, risk-taking, adventurous, and they’re also persistent and somewhat rebellious or unconventional,” she said. “When you have all of those traits, it makes you more vulnerable to rejection … There’s an underlying fundamental way of approaching life and the world that leads to both creativity and vulnerability to mental illness.