The links are clear between insanity and creative genius, suggesting better ways might be found to help sufferers of mental disorders.

The only performance that makes it Mick Jagger’s rock star advises James Fox’s gangster in Performance, ” is the one that achieves madness.” This embracing of derangement has been a debating point in our experience of art for centuries, and is found everywhere today. In Peter Shaffers Equus, a psychiatrist called Martin Dysart wrestles with the problem of “curing” the mad-but ecstatic teenager Alan Strang:how can he force Strang to relinquish his communion with a horse God and return to an “utterly worshipless” normality? Shouldn’t the boy be “allowed” to be insane, when it gives him something to worship?

In a much discussed TV Documentary last year, actor Stephen Fry explained that hundreds of highly intelligent, creative people have been diagnosed as manic depressive, before telling the world( with a hint of pride) “I have extremes of moods that are greater than just about anybody I know”.

He revealed that many victims of “bipolar disorder” preferred to endure the aching chasms of depression without therapy or drugs, because of the creative high they experienced in the manic phase. ” I wouldn’t be without it,” he said “for all the tea in China”

Do the mad have access to hidden worlds of imagination, denied to the sane? Is madness the final frontier of art and science? Is genius only a step away from insanity? Many artists and writers, scientists and philosophers and intellectuals have thought so in the past. “Great wits are sure to madness near allied/ And thin partitions do their bounds divide,” wrote John Dryden in 1681.

In the 20th Century, as quantum physics made the world of physics increasingly knowable, the “mad scientist” and Einstein-haired boffin became comic figures, men deranged by their excessive devotion to the not-yet-known. In past centuries, poets gave themselves airs as divinely maddened.

Shakespeare himself identified the connecting in ” A Midsummer Nights dream” when Theseus reflects on the creative act of turning unknown and unearthly things into words.

But what do we make, today , of lunatics and poets, scientists and fruitcakes? Do we still see a link between creativity and madness? For Phillip Thomas, a Professor in Lancaster Universities Psychology department, the answer is a qualified yes. “Its certainly interpreted that way. There have always been people in societies and cultures who have different experiences of reality compared with the majority, and there’s always been an overlap between people who have gifts or insights, and people who are identified as suffering from mental illnesses.”

What’s the distinguishing factor about the mentally ill writer or scientist? “Strangeness”, he says firmly, “Its the strangeness of people’s experience, and what they try to communicate about it, that’s dangerous, threatening, anxiety provoking to those of us who have conventional rationalities, If I can put it that way. Those people often seem to be visionaries, shamans, people with privileged access to a world which ordinary mortals don’t have access to- either that or they are seen as brilliantly creative. In the past 400 years there’s been a tendency to see certain people, from our own time as well as retrospectively , as great minds, geniuses and brilliant thinkers but also as people who showed signs of mental instability.”

Artists, he says, do not have it all to themselves; scientists suffer just as much from “manic creativity”. he instances John Nash, as played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind- a Great mathematician who watched himself gradually losing his reason.” He was seeing something denied to the rest of us,” says Thomas. “The trouble is, such people are trying to put the unspeakable into words. But since the time of Plato and Aristotle, we’ve been preoccupied with the idea of rational, self-aware, speaking self, using language understandable by others. Those who experience madness are cut off from the mainstream of Western thought and Society.”

How does it feel from the point of view of the sufferer? Sara Maitland, 56,is a prize-winning novelist and short story writer, the author of several works of theology and gardening, and a teacher of creative writing. She has also, since her teens, suffered from visitations of mental disarray. She has spent time in mental hospital.

“I took myself there, though I didn’t have a lot of choice. I was on drugs off and on. Of course, this was some time before the voices.”

Its piquant to listen to this charming, ferociously gifted woman chatting about the voices which settled in her head over the years. “I’ve never believed its a completely external, fully embodied voice, she says. “Some people do I always know that they’re something to do with my imagination. I tend to record what they say in notebooks.”
Was her writing improved by the voices?
” Yes I think they gave me better insights. In my second novel Virgin Territory , I tried to use the voices directly, to incorporate them. It was exhausting. Once is quite enough for that.”

Does she think mentally disturbed people produce valuable work as a result of their disability? “I don’t want to saythat evil psychiatrists and the Government are trying to stop the production of wonderful artworks, because it is more complicated than that. But I’d say there is a connection between those kinds of excitements ad imaginative excitements. Which doesn’t mean every artist has to be psychotic, nor that every psychotic is an artist.”

She doesn’t want to lose the noisy companions in her head. “The point isn’t to drug the voices out of existence, but to negotiate with them. Really it’s just the same as having a lo of ill-behaved toddlers in the house. You tell your health visitor, “My toddlers are driving me around the bend”, and she says, “oh hit them over the head and drown them’. But you don’t want to kill them. You just want them to behave.”

It annoys her that psychiatry labels Yorkshire Ripper murderer Peter Sutcliffe and Poet William Blake with the same condition. And Thomas agrees.

Like Maitland, he doesn’t believe in Schizophrenia, a “made up 19th century- Greek word which has no meaning and no longer has any useful value”. he talks instead about “states of mind in intense distress, that exist in a form of psychosis”, but is wary of recommending standard treatments.

“Some patients find psychiatric treatment helpful, and if they want that, fine. Many find it harmful, in which case they shouldn’t be forced to have it.

” I think psychiatry should spend more time developing ways of helping people make sense of their distressing experiences because, in a way, that’s what creativity is about.”

-Independent



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