Speaking at the 2009 Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference, Gilbert said we put too much pressure on artists and other creative people by holding them responsible for their own inspiration:

Allowing somebody ... to believe that he or she is ... the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, internal mystery is just like a smidge of too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche [...] It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all of these unnatural expectations about performance. I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.

Instead, she advocates a return to a pre-Renaissance attitude in which creativity was believed to come from the outside, from "a magical divine entity" or "mystical fairy juice." Artists would feel better, she says, if they accepted that their creative impulses didn't come from them, but were instead "on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life, which you pass along when you're finished to somebody else."

Focusing too much on one's own greatness or lack thereof can drive anybody off their rocker, but this "mythical fairy juice" smacks of New Age faux-religiosity to us. If you believe in God, then divine inspiration makes sense — but if all you've got is "some unimaginable source," is this vague spirituality really all that helpful? Leaving the spiritual question aside, the biggest problem for most artists/writers/creative people in general isn't crushing societal expectations — it's money. Give me reliable health insurance and I'll believe in whatever fairy juice you want.

TED: Eat, Pray, Love Author on How We Kill Geniuses [Wired]

Psychologist and novelist Paul Verhaeghen describes himself as "somewhat mood disordered," and says, "one of the things I do is think about something over and over and over again, and that's when I start writing." However, "if you think about stuff in your life and you start thinking about it again, and again, and again, and you kind of spiral away in this continuous rumination about what's happening to you and to the world — people who do that are at risk for depression." Obsessive rumination and reflection can lead to insightful and surprising works of art; Verhaeghen mentions David Foster Wallace, whose "breathless" sentences "need to be annotated, and the annotations need to be annotated again." However, these same mental habits can get the brain stuck in painful patterns, as David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide on September 12, no doubt knew.

The idea that creativity and mental illness are connected is an old one, and one that has done a lot of damage. Miserable people have created some beautiful things, but the belief that misery is necessary for art, or the price one pays for the gift of artistic genius, may discourage artists from getting treatment. It also reinforces the notion some depressed people have that their worldview is the correct one, and that happy people just aren't paying enough attention. And it encourages people like Eric Wilson, author of Against Happiness, to wish for just a little bit of depression — enough to write good books, but not enough to commit suicide. Like people who misguidedly wish for a little anorexia to trim those extra 20 pounds, boosters of mild artistic depression forget that mental illness isn't like gas for your brain — you don't just get to pump in how much you want.

However, acknowledging that bipolar disorder can be linked to creativity could have an upside. It's popular today to view mental problems as diseases, like diabetes, that afflict people with no connection to their personalities. But mental illness is more complicated than that. It's often difficult to separate one mental illness from another, and to separate the symptoms of mental illness from the traits of character. If we viewed people holistically, we might be better able to help them live happily and healthily, without giving up what makes them unique.

Experts ponder link between creativity, mood disorders [CNN]

There is a growing backlash against the pop-a-pill-get-happy version of recovery, in which those of us marginally depressed are encouraged to be more "normal" in part, according to teacher Jess Decourcy Hinds, "because observing another's anguish isn't easy." NYU Professor Jerome Wakefield (who co-authored The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder) has students coming up to him all the time asking how to get their parents to lay off the Prozac-pushing because they want to feel their emotions sometimes. And, as previously mentioned, psychiatrist Charles Barber, author of Comfortably Numb notes that emotions — even those brought on by the loss of a relationship, a friend, a job, or a family member — are normal and meant to be felt rather than medicated away.

While significant depression is bad (and requires medication and/or therapy) and it's uncomfortable to watch someone suffer emotionally, some sadness or mild depression is often actually required for some people to learn anything and grow as a person, and it's often necessary for some of us to feel inspired. Author Eric Wilson, whose book Against Happiness came out late last month, argues that "the happy man is a hollow man," but we're pretty sure he meant to say "human."

University of Illinois psychologist Ed Diener finds that there's a high-correlation between self-reported levels of "happiness" and stable, long-term relationships. His reasoning is that "if you have positive illusions about your partner, which goes along with the highest levels of happiness, you're more likely to commit to an intimate relationship." On the other hand, if you're just sort of vaguely unhappy without being actually paralyzed with ennui, you tend to make more money, achieve greater career success, get more educated and pay more attention to politics because you're trying to not be unhappy.

Being stressed and unhappy has a biological purpose, according to Diener and evolutionary biologists, who note that fear tend to force animals into action and "sadness" in mammals tends to result needed empathetic actions in others. Either way, would you rather live in a world in which the music is all Sweet Caroline and the photographs of Anne Geddes or is it a substantially better place with Nina Simone and Vincent Van Gogh even if you have to watch some of the rest of us less-creative types be unhappy?

Happiness: Enough Already [Newsweek]
Earlier: What's The Difference Between A "Real" Depressive And A Lazy Pill Freak?