#0064 Are The “Best” Creatives “Crazy”?
More about mental health and creativity
Last time (#0063) I asked if the “best” artists, authors, and performers are “crazy.” Let me again present the four examples of creatives who struggled with their mental health in the form of a quiz.
SKIP this week if you don’t want to read about mental health challenges, suicide, addiction. If even reading that list is too much, please reach out to Crisis Text Line with the word HELP:
US: text to 741741 (o envíe un mensaje de texto con AYUDA)
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UK: text to 85258
Ireland: text to 50808
True or False…
Vincent van Gogh:
(a) Lived with epilepsy in poverty
(b) Cut off his own left ear
(c) Shot himself in the stomach
Virginia Woolf:
(a) Transcribed the voices in her head
(b) Protested WWII in her suicide note
(c) Had a room of her own
James Baldwin:
(a) Became agoraphobic when a teenager
(b) Wrote autofiction about life as a gay Black man
(c) Was a key voice of the Civil Rights movement
Judy Garland:
(a) Sang, danced, and acted, aka was a triple threat
(b) Suffered from multiple addictions
(c) Raised awareness of HIV/AIDS
Don’t worry, I won’t hold you in suspense.
For too long.
Did I mention there was at least one True statement for each person? (Feel free to change some of your guesses.)
Okay! Here’s the cheat sheet with explanations following.
Vincent van Gogh:
(a) Lived with epilepsy in poverty TRUE
(b) Cut off his own left ear maybe FALSE!
(c) Shot himself in the stomach maybe FALSE!
Virginia Woolf:
(a) Transcribed the voices in her head (probably) FALSE!
(b) Protested WWII in her suicide note FALSE!
(c) Had a room of her own TRUE
James Baldwin:
(a) Became agoraphobic when a teenager FALSE!
(b) Wrote autofiction about life as a gay Black man (mostly) TRUE
(c) Was a key voice of the Civil Rights movement TRUE
Judy Garland:
(a) Sang, danced, and acted, aka was a triple threat TRUE
(b) Suffered from multiple addictions TRUE
(c) Raised awareness of HIV/AIDS FALSE!
Vincent van Gogh
Everybody knows Vincent van Gogh cut off his own left ear. The self-portrait (which he painted while looking in a mirror, so it looks like the right ear) shows his head all bandaged up. Right?
Maybe not. Two German historians published a book in 2009 (in German, which I don’t read beyond checking citations, so I’m going off press interviews1 from the time) saying van Gogh got into a disagreement with his artist friend (and fencer) Paul Gauguin. When they were strolling in the evening, Gauguin announced he was leaving France, van Gogh got mad and lashed out not with words but with a razor? (I walk with a whistle…) Gauguin flicked his fencing foil (was he using it as a walking stick?!), cutting off van Gogh’s lower earlobe. Since Gauguin didn’t want to get in trouble and van Gogh didn’t want to lose his infatuation, er, friend, they fabricated the “tortured artist” story of van Gogh’s self-mutilation.
Styling van Gogh as a tortured artist came easily to the late-nineteenth-century press. His moods and presentation bolstered the claim. We now know the artist had mental health challenges, perhaps what today would be called bipolar disorder. He lived with epilepsy and in (self-imposed) poverty, leading to malnutrition, later in his life. Is it any wonder the story of van Gogh’s death was reported a suicide?
At the end of 2020, the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology published an article where three MDs question whether van Gogh died by suicide or murder. After reviewing the available evidence, they believe van Gogh could not have shot himself with the revolver in the corn field. They call for an exhumation and autopsy for the needed forensic evidence to prove definitively what happened.2
Virginia Woolf
With the use of interior monologues, fractured narratives, and stream-of-consciousness techniques, Virginia Woolf is known as one of the most innovative writers of the twentieth century. Though these innovations might come across to some as the transcription of the voices in one's head, Woolf never tapped into auditory hallucinations for her writing. (Though she did mention the distraction: “I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate.”3)
Woolf wrote important essays on feminist topics, including the need for a room of one’s own. Her husband, Leonard, described her room as a mess.
She had several mental breakdowns, the first after her mother died when Woolf was 13; the second, after her father died when she was 22. As she lost more friends and family through the years, Woolf repeatedly fell into depressions and attempted suicides but would then bounce back, writing prolifically. Some would now characterize her mental health challenges as a kind of bipolar disorder.
When the UK media quoted the coroner as saying Woolf was too sensitive to wartime as a reason for her suicide, people wrote mean letters, which the press published. It was up to grieving Leonard to set the record straight. He shared that Woolf began her suicide letter with these lines: “I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times.” Leonard then chronicled her mental health challenges. Yet the press misprinted her words as these terrible times, indicating World War II, under the headline: “I Cannot Carry On.” It took more than a year for Leonard to correct “the media’s spin of Woolf’s suicide as an act of unpatriotic cowardice rather than a personal tragedy.”
James Baldwin
One of nine children raised in poverty in Harlem in a segregated American where his grandparents had been enslaved, James Baldwin became an indispensable American writer: “Time and time over in fiction as in reportage, Baldwin tears himself free of his rhetorical fastenings and stands forth on the page utterly absorbed in the reality of the person before him, strung with his nerves, riveted to his feelings, breathing his breath.”
Following his stepfather’s example, Baldwin was a preacher as a teenager. Readers often recognize the rhythms and phrasings of the church later echoed in his essays, speeches, plays, stories, and novels.
Though he lived much of his adult life abroad, Baldwin’s writing reflected his own experiences as a gay Black man in twentieth-century America. Together with his friends Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and others, he lent his voice to the Civil Rights movement.
Would some of his stories today be labeled autofiction? Probably not until you know more. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was an autobiographical work about growing up in Harlem. His mental health challenges also appeared in his writings. Baldwin, according to his friend and biographer, was obsessed with the subject of suicide throughout his life and tried to commit suicide several times. He was so haunted by a potential lover jumping off a bridge “that Baldwin’s character Rufus in Another Country would later imitate” the act. When Baldwin died of stomach cancer, he was already revered as one of the most important and vocal advocates for equality.
Judy Garland
Even as a young girl, Judy Garland could sing like nobody’s business, dance, and act, what’s known as a triple threat in showbiz. By the time she starred in The Wizard of Oz at age 17, she was addicted to the prescription uppers and downers her handlers at the Hollywood studio, and maybe even her mother, had given her for years.4 Garland struggled with drug and alcohol addictions as well as several mental health challenges for the rest of her life.
While her campy performances are beloved by not only the gay community but also everyone else, she died of an accidental overdose in 1969, long before celebrities raised awareness of HIV/AIDS. (You’re probably thinking of her Hollywood studio classmate, Elizabeth Taylor).
True or False
The four examples of creatives who all had mental health challenges prove the “best” creatives are “crazy.” FALSE!
What the Science and Anecdotes Say
There’s been a lot of talk about the connection between mental health and creativity among neuroscientists and psychiatrists. When I began digging into the scientific literature to read about and link to some studies, I discovered that most of the research was shaky.
For example, I cherry-picked four well-known examples — van Gogh, Woolf, Baldwin, Garland — of creatives who struggled. Guess what? I could next choose four top-tier writers, artists, and performers who never had mental health challenges. Small sample sizes from particular groups make research less than stellar.
Anecdotally, at least, it seems there’s a connection between our minds and our creativity. When depressed, some people report they have a new perspective that gets them past writer’s block. Though I do not consider neurodivergent folks as having mental health challenges, their nonconformist brains can come up with great out-of-the-box solutions. Memoirs from bipolar and schizophrenic writers include the advantages of their different minds.5
Nature and Nurture
Sometimes a person’s circumstances shape their minds. Vincent and James were raised by stern religious father figures. Virginia and Judy never attended regular school. From an early age, Judy and James had to help support their families. James and Virginia were gay when the word was defined as happy and didn’t mean part of the LGBTQIA+ community.
We now know that some people are predisposed to mental health challenges. The information is not a curse but a piece of the genetic puzzle from our family.6
Rejections and Mental Health
Often the more sensitive of people seek outlets in the creative arts. Sometimes for themselves but sometimes for others.
Do you crave time to write or paint or sing?
Last week I began to ask if we should follow in the footsteps of “crazy” creatives to become the “best.” Vincent and Virginia and James and Judy were people who felt compelled to share — their visions, their gifts, their insights — with the world.
Do you feel a need to share with others?
When we try to get our creativity out into the world, we run up against rejection. We here at 100 Rejections Club know to embrace rejection because it shows we’re trying, because we know it’s not about us, because we can learn from it, because we are here together.
We are a sensitive bunch in the very best way.
Continue to create,
continue to share, and
continue to lean on each other
to support our creativity and our mental health.
Next time: Something completely different
I found the interview via this website about the book, play, and documentary called Starry Night: The New Story of Vincent van Gogh.
PubMed lists similar articles. My favorite title? “Doctor Gachet, in the kitchen, with the foxglove.”
Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter to Leonard appears as an image and is transcribed at The Marginalian.
Not sure what to believe in a story about Judy Garland from the UK’s Daily Mail.
Since this post is getting loooooong, maybe I’ll do a roundup of some of these memoirs another time.
There’s sooooo much to say about nature and nurture. But did I mention the length of this post?
Judy Garland’s story you describe reminds me of the memoir: I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy! I wonder if those stories were similar in a way..