Bipolar = Creativity?

Is there a connection between bipolar mental states and super creative individuals?  

*super creative as evidenced in the visual, performing (including sports), linguistic (spoken & written), auditory/music arts…as well as mathematics, the sciences, technological and business innovators.  Basically anyone whose gifts transcend the norm and help transform what is thought of as possible.

I was reflecting on Andy Irons and bipolar states of mind…  For those of you unfamiliar with AI, as he is know in the surf world…which, by the way, many (if not most) long time surfers familiar with professional surfing will immediately recognize his initials as much as his name.  That should be one major clue about how profound his impact on modern surfing was.

Anyway, here was a regular guy from Kauai, an outer island in the Hawaiian chain, who rose to the top of the professional surfing world not once but three times.  Andy Irons didn’t make it just as a pure competitor but also as a tremendously gifted and fearless performance based athlete.  His competitive successes were combined with relentlessly hard charging and creative “free” surfing which consistently raised the bar of what one was capable of accomplishing on a wave.

Check out this clip of him surfing Indonesia.

  

Then his game sputtered.  In the midst of mounting a comeback, to the extent that he won a challenging competition at one of the most demanding surf breaks on the top tier world professional surfing tour, something happened.  Then, boom, he was gone.  Not just out of the competitive surf scene.  Dead.  Not just dead, but dead…alone…in an airport-close hotel near Dallas, Texas.  AI was trying to get back home to Hawaii and his pregnant wife.  He didn’t make it.

Now, a long term documentary project, four years in the making, is soon to be released about AI. Parts of the film appear to be about his personal struggles.  One of his life challenges apparently was being bipolar.

Could AI’s bipolar mental state have helped influence his unbelievably creative surfing and unfortunately his eventual demise?  Was there a connection?

So, I did what any other 21st century person does, I “Googled” it.  After scrolling through the long list of potential sources, I whittled my choices down to articles: 1) written by professional research scholars 2) published by recognizable and respectable magazines like Psychology Today and The Atlantic 3) written to be read by a reasonably educated layman.  

Of those choices I focused primarily on an article published in the July/August 2014 The Atlantic magazine authored by Dr. Nancy C. Andreasen.  She is a well known and respected psychiatrist and neuroscientist who has worked in the field since the 1960s.  For the complete article…click here.  Below is a short segment of a PBS interview with Dr. Andreasen.

And lastly, here is a quote from that article:

As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university’s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study.

The quote continues…

He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother’s Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II. His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician, recounts his experiences in two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric problems. “My mother, my cousins, and my sisters weren’t doing so great,” he writes. “We had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and other ‘issues.’ ”)

So…it seems the answer to my opening question is…yeah, it there pretty much is some sort of link between bipolar mental states and increased creativity.  Not in every case of course.  In other words, not every bipolar person is super creative AND not every super creative person is bipolar.  HOWEVER,  there does appear to be a significant correlation between the two based on Dr. Andreasen’s studies.  Kinda puts a different spin on calling someone “crazy smart,” eh?

Cheers!