Creativity and Bipolar Disorder

im there with you,
thoughts thinking through my head
until three days after yesterday.
if only time stood still so we
could catch up,
instead we gasp for air
in holes below with
the weathered and ruined
as the well walk above.

ouroboros has slithered into our
subconscious and whispered hysterically,
our wrists have wept red
our eyes bled blue
and we've melted into puddles of gray.

withdrawn within ourselves,
too tired to talk back,
hoping that tomorrow will shine,
but tomorrow is always
days away.

pills pile high in our palms,
and prescription pads
simply say more,
as we scream at doctors
through stone faces.

melancholy meanders
through us like
manic inner monologues
haunting us day and night.

so what do we live for?
the good ones
the good ones
the good ones
emotions.
they're out there.

we have to fight
every day,
we have to stay strong
every day,
we have to live
every day.

First, let me say that my brother was bipolar, had his first breakdown at 15, was mis-diagnosed, and took his life in 2000 at age 52. Because we went to separate boarding schools and colleges and were six years apart, I hardly knew him after I went off to school when he was seven years of age. As an adult he lived what I called an underground life--secretive, mildly paranoid, occasionally heedless, incredibly manipulative, and holding his cards to his own detriment. He seemed to track right down the "normal" path for a bipolar-promising career as a creative person in advertising and marketing, marriage, a son, alcoholism, divorce, disability, and suicide. He kept me perpetually off-balance, frustrated, and angry towards him as he manipulated the information about himself in what he considered to be his own self-interest. When he died it was extraordinarily difficult to write a eulogy with specificity as I experienced profound guilt over how little I knew him and was so unaware how much he genuinely suffered. After he died I became increasingly concerned that his son was bipolar, too, but his mother was not open to the thought, and 10 years later, at 30 years of age he took his life leaving a wife and two young daughters.

Second, in retirement I wtite novels and my latest novel, The Chess Players, treats Caravaggio as a supporting character whose behavior one of my priciplal characters seeks to explain in modern psychiatric terms. Working with two psychiatrists who are friends and neighbors on Martha's Vineyard, it is pretty clear that Caravaggio was bipolar and exhibited 400 years ago virtually all of the symptoms of bipolar disorder that we recognize today as described by Desmond Seward, in his well-documented biography, "Caravaggio, A Passionate Life." Regrettably a 9-10 page fictionalized portrait of Caravaggio had to be edited out. I believe this is the first time in fiction or non-fiction that this assertion was made in print, and I believe it is a genuine contribution to art history. My character, Laetitia Martin integrates this into her interpretation of Caravaggio's painting in Malta, "The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist." The Chess Olayers, pp 287-294, Navy Log Books, 2011, ISBN 978-0-615-41451-5.

P.S. I live just around the corner from BMC.

Yes wow, what a comforting article, also sent it to my parents. I have been an artist since I was 5, and art major in highschool, and opted for internet design for a living(but just started painting again). I also had a matter of substance abuse(self-medicating) just to be more not up and down...the creativity vanished during this.
Always an superior athlete and artist, who knew I would turn to self medication. I did find God's (Word) and it has been tough, but the diagnosis helped me understand myself.
We are lucky, just feel the spirit to express and it comes from Tao, Heaven, Enlightment...whatever you believe in. I am Catholic so prayer helps balance the moods, yoga, meditation etc. Breathe, stretch, be in your body not your mind all the time.
My main advice would be try to balance it out, make sure you have a strong social support system. You also have to love life it is a blessing and gift.
I thought I was crazy and here I am just a person that needs to draw or paint...and write in a journal everyday. Geez!!

When I was first diagnosed with Bipolar, I didn't know what the heck it was. I was 37 and my sister passed of cancer, which my Dr's believe was the trigger for its manifestation. I was treated for depression for over a year and nothing worked. Finally I was referred for day treatment, of which i partook of for 17 days. During that period, the counselors observed symptoms that indicated Bipolar tendencies. (Thank God for astute counselors). The psychiatrist I was seeing at the day treatment center dismissed their assessments and continued to treat me for Depression. A counselor took me to the side, shared her assessment and the controversy with me, and suggested I change Dr's, because she and the staff that worked with me daily felt the Dr was not treating me properly, and I followed her advice. The new Dr I began with, took their notes and assessments into consideration, and not only began treatment, but also tested me further. They hit the hammer on the nail, however I had never heard of the disorder before. I discovered shortly afterwards that my brother was diagnosed as bipolar at the age of 14 (we are 8yrs apart) while I was away in college. As was my father, of which I did not know. Sad, how this disorder is considered a blemish, in which people dont want others to know.

Anyhoos, after trying lots of combinations in meds I was finally prescribed, successfully, Lamictil, Neurontin and Abilify (I hate that one) as my treatment meds. Lamictil I love. Neurontin works well also, because I also have nerve damage in my neck/arm/hand. Abilify makes me feel irritable and lethargic, but it helps me with my depression issues. My world has turned upside down since my diagnosis. My family tells me I used to be so nice, so quiet, and so mellow, and now I am outspoken and quicker to stand up for myself. Sometimes I feel like I have changed into a better person as far as my defenses are concerned, because before the onset of my Bipolar, I did not speak up for myself when done wrong, or if I did I was very haphazard about it, because I was not USED to doing so. However, considering the situations that have occurred in my life since all of this transpired, I find it has been a survival mode of my mind. The battles I have had to fight and stand up for have been a success because of the change in my personality. I guess God grace my "emotional flaw" into the blessing of survival mode.

For example, I have had to stand up for my disability rights on my job. The "personality change" that transpired from my onset of Bipolar was the motivator in winning an EEOC complaint. Also in two other cases, willing two major legal disputes in court against the Attorney General for my state regarding ADA accommodation cases. My husband attributes those manic episodes as determining factors that helped me win my case, along with the "belief" that bipolar people have higher than average IQs (My IQ is 133 - nowhere near the 145 you were scored at). (His mother has a Masters Degree in Sociology and swears that bipolar individuals are gifted individuals and her word, to him, is the ultimate truth). I dont know if that is factual or not, I just know that God knew what He was doing when the time in my life came when this disorder surfaced and led me to survive in spite of the hype associated with it.

I find the disorder to be both a blessing and a curse at times. I am a different person now, with highs and lows: good days and bad days. There are days that I am so energized that I feel as if I could conquer the world and set out to do so with whatever I have to address in my life. Then there are days in which I don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to move, don't want to face the day ahead and wonder why I lived and my sister passed. The struggle to keep moving gets overwhelming during these times, and I have no one who can understand me. I am labeled by my family as "crazy" when I say no, while in the past I strove to please everyone. I guess I had a personality disorder prior to the manifestation of Bipolar, and didn't know about it. The manic periods start out as energetic, exciting times but gradually become strained due to lack of sleep along with the racing thoughts. Medicine can only control so much of it, and the rest has to be walked out-with the crash finally and just dropping off to sleep for 12-14 hrs straight. Life has definitely changed for me.

Perhaps the hardest part of this disorder is losing my creativity over time. I don't know whether to attribute it to the meds or the progression of the disorder, but I find my writing skills to be more challenging as I grow older. Now, almost 7yrs since my confirmed diagnosis, I find my literary skills more difficult. I used to be able to sit down and in one session, write a perfect paper. I didn't even have to critique it, and would get a perfect grade on it. Now I have to check my spelling, because I don't spell as well as I used to. And that frustrates me.

Do I regret my disorder? No. I thank God for the change in my personality that made me stronger to stand up for my sense of right and wrong. The only change I pray for is the subtleness to express myself with less bluntness, so as to not be offensive when challenging the ills of my world. I just pray that I don't regress to a worse state of psychosis. I want to continue to work on improving the "new me".

can it trigger onset of b p ?

I am bipolar and left-handed. If anyone ever studies left-handed, bipolar, red-headed hyperlipodemic diabetics, let me know. I won 120 contests and awards. I told a Dr I won 100 awards and he put me on lithium. I told a Dr I reported a company for 100 OSHA violations and he put me on Depokote. I told a Dr I was writing an ammendment to the Bible and she put me on Risperdol and I paced around shaking for a week. I told a Dr I just slept with 40 women and she put my on Seroquel. I told a Dr now it's 50 and she added Trileptal. I stopped taking Abilify and my grades on writing assignments improved. If it were not for Rozerem and Simply Sleep I would stay up 70 hours at a time writing poems, stories, letters, painting, and winning more awards. Why do we call greatness grandiose? Okay Okay I was talking to spies on the bugged phone, but don't take away my awards!!!!!!!!!

My experience with this "illness" has been one of gratitude, not of fear. As Rilke writes, "Perhaps everything fearful is basically helplessness that seeks our help." Society often gives names to entire sections of life and that does no service to the tapestry of human emotions that compose reality.

"Why should we not encounter difficulties?"

"To return to the subject of aloneness: It becomes increasingly clear that it is basically not something we can choose to have or not to have. We simply are alone. One can only delude one's self and act as though it were not so -- that is all. How much better, however, that we concede we are solitary beings; yes, that we assume it to be true. Our minds will certainly reel at the thought, for all points on which we could heretofore focus shall be taken from us. There is nothing near and familiar left us; everything is in the distance, unendingly far away.

A person would have a similar feeling, were he, with practically no preparation or transition, taken from his home and placed on the summit of a high mountain. It would be a feeling of unequald uncertaintly - a vulnerability to a nameless something would nearly destroy him. He would think he were falling or would believe himself flung out into space or burse asunder into a thousand pieces. What a colossal lie his mind would have to invent to catch up with the condition of his senses and to clarify it. That is how all sense of distance, all measurements change for the one who is alone.

Some of these changes cause many to lose all perspective. And, as with the man on the pinnacle of the mountain, unusual imaginings emerge and strange sensations arise that seem to grow beyond everything endurable. But it is necessary that we experience that also. We must accept our existence to the greatest extent possible; everything, the unprecendented also, needs to be accepted. That is basically the only case of courage required of us: to be courageous in the face of the strangest, the most whimsical and unexplainable thing that we could encounter.

The fact that people have been cowards in that regard has caused infinite harm to life. The experiences that one calls "ghosts", the entire spirit world, death, all these related things have been forced out of life through daily resistance to such an extent that the senses with which we could grasp them have become atrophied. And that is not even considering the question of God.

The fear of the unexplainable not only impoverished the existence of the individual, but also caused the relationship of one person to another to be limited. It is as though fear has caused something to be lifted out of a riverbed of limitless possibilites to a fallow stretch of shore where nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that causes the unspeakably monotonous and unrenewed human condition to repeat itself again and again. It is the aversion to anything new, any unpredictable experience, which is believed to untenable.

Only he who can expect anything, who does not exclude even the mysterious, will have a relationship to life greater than just being alive; he will exhaust his own wellspring of being. If we liken the existence of the individual to a room of larger or smaller size, it is evident that most people are familiar with only a corner of their room, perhaps a window seat or space where they pace to and fro. In that way they have a certain security. Yet every uncertainty fraught with danger is so much more human. It is th esame uncertainty that motivated the prisoners in Edgar Allen Poe's stories to explore the form of their terrible prisons and not to be a stranger to the unspeakable horrors of their presence there.

But we are not prisoners. There are no traps or snares set for us, and there is nothing that should frighten or torture us. We are placed into life, into the element best suited to it. Besides, through thousands of years of adaptation, we have acquired such a resemblance to this life, that we, if we stood still, would hardly be distinguishable from our surroundings. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our own terrors. If it has precipices, they belong to us. If dangers are present, we must try to love them. And if we fashion our life according to that principle, which advise us to embrace that which is difficult, then that which appears to us to be the very strangest will become the most worthy of our trust, and the truest.

How could we be capable of forgetting the old myths that stand at the threshold of all mankind, myths of dragons transforming themselves at the last moment into princesses? Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous? Perhaps everything fearful is basically helplessness that seeks our help?

Reality is always for sale to the highest bidder. It always has been. "Please, dear friend, think about this: Did not this great sadness rather pass through you? Did not much within you change? Did you not, somehow at some place in your being, change while you were sad? "

"The only sad experiences which are dangerous and bad are those that one reveals to people in order to drown them out. Like illnesses treated superficially and incompetently, they retreat and, after a short pause, break out even more intensely. They gather together within the self and are life. They are life unlived, ridiculed and scorned. " Rainer Maria Rilke

All of us who labor in the arts know that it can be a lonely existence. And art does not always have to be the classical definition of the word. Art can be the ability to weave from life a tapestry that communicates a vision that no one else seems to value or share. On some days, this can become overwhelming. We then thirst for a single voice of understanding that will reach into our solitary lives and reassure us that the path we have chosen is worthy, and that the rewards it offers are worth the loneliness it entails.

I recommend reading Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, a German Poet. It is a deceptively simple book. It consists of ten short letters, written over a five-year period to an aspiring young poet named Franz Xaver Kappus. The letter ranges freely over a variety of subjects, from the dangers of an ironic worldview to the value of faith and the close link between physical and creative ecstasy. But, always, they come back to the fundamnetal theme of the aloneness of the creative spirit, and the demands it makes upon the lives of those who labor in its service. Rilke came from a background that made him deeply sympathetic to the struggles of anyone striving to be an artist. His father had been a career military man and had sent his son off to a military boarding school with the intention of training him to be an officer. Rilke, weak of constitution and romantic in temperament, was ill suited to the physical rigors and severe discipline at the school, and was subjected to numerous cruelties by his classmates and teachers. During these five trying years he found his greatest solace and self-expression in the act of writing poetry.

Here is an excerpt:

"You must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, when a sadness arises within you of such magnitude as you have never experienced, or when restlessness overshadows all you do, like light and the shadow of clouds gliding over your hand. You must believe that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand. It shall not let you fall.

Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where everything comes from and where it is headed? You do know that you are in a period of transition and wish for nothing as much as to transform yourself. If some aspect of your life is not well, the consider the illness to be the means for an organism to free itself from something foreign to it. In that case you must help it to be ill and to have its whole illness, to let it break out. That is the course of its progress.

So much is happening within you at present, dear Mr. Kappus. You need to be as patient as someone ill and as optimistic as one recuperating, for perhaps you are both. And more: You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait. And that, above all, to the extent that you are your physician, you must do now.

Do not scrutinize yourself too closely. Do not draw conclusions too quickly from that which is happening to you. Just allow it to happen. Otherwise you might easily begin to look with blame (that is, morally speaking) upon your past, which, of course, is very much a part of everything that you encounter now. The influences of the vagaries, the wishes and longings of your boyhood upon your present life are not the ones you remember or pass judgment on. The unusual conditions of a lonely and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, vulnerable to so many influences, and at the same time so distant from all real connections with life, that, whenever a vice may have entered, one may not simply call it a vice. One must, in any case, be very careful with that nomenclature. It is often the name of the crime upon which a life shatters, not the nameless and personal act itself at all. It might have been a definite necessity of this person's life, of which he may simply have availed himself.

The expending of effort seems so important to you only because you value victory too much. It is not the "great thing" that you believe to have achieved, even though you have a right to your feelings. The great thing is that there was something present -- and you were allowed to substitute it in place of your misconceptions -- something true and real. Without it your victory also would have been a mere moral reaction without meaning. As it is, it has become a chapter in your life - your life, dear Mr. Kappus, I think of it wish so many wishes for you.

Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of your has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.

If I were to tell you one more thing, it would be this: Do not believe that the one who seeks to comfort you lives without difficulty the simple and humble words that sometimes help you. His life contains much grief and sadness and he remains far behind you. Were it not so, he would not have found those words."

-----

"It is always my wish that you might find enough patience within yourself to endure, and enough innocence to have faith... Believe me, life is right in all cases." -- Furuborg, Jonsered, Sweden 4 November 1904

"I can only wish that you trustingly and patiently allow that grand solitude to work in you....It will act as an anonymous influence, akin to how ancestral blood constantly moves and merges with our own and links with tha of the individual, never to be unlinked." Paris the day after Christmas, 1908

"Reflect on the world that you carry within yourself. And name this thinking what you wish... Your innermost happening is worth all your love." Rome 23 December 1903

"If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable." Worpswede, near Bremen 16 July 1903

"Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakably tender hand, placed beside another thread, and held and carried by a hundred others." Viareggio, near Pisa, Italy 23 April 1903

I don't know..
I do know, I drove myself crazy when the whole onset of bipolar hit me. I couldn't fathom myself being a real life crazy person, and the worst part was I had to admit that to myself. I see a lot of people sharing their 4 part cocktails with us, this is really non conclusive information, because everybody gets a unique diagnosis. Don't wait for a doc to tell you what's up, go read on it and indulge yourself, you all have insight, sharp enough to trigger your moods, so fuck the doctors. I do have some words for the people that are new to all of this, please don't dwell on your diagnosis and all of your shortcomings, embrace yourself, fight for and seek creative outlets. I play guitar, it's great, it makes my dreams come true, and lets me exercise my ego...so all of that manic energy you have has truth.

I am so terrified of not being able to write anymore can anyone on meds tell me the truth. Will I lose it! Where can we post poetry.

Well i never thought i would come across something that made me feel a little less mad. Having an unbalanced brain such as myself you tend to think that you are alone in this and you are going mad! I now know that its not the case. I suffer from mood swings like you would never believe. Some days i love my life, people around me and my creative streak and other days i feel as though my world is closing in and i get irrational thoughts as the panic takes over and cripples me. It takes me ages to get over this empty feeling then like someone has swicthed a swicth, im back on top of the world again cursed to have another episode in the next few weeks. I have had this problem since i was a child but it has got so much worse. Now my brain has its own life and decides to scare the crap out of me every couple of days. I am trying to get published as i love to write childrens short stories (fantasy) but i cant concerntrate and focus myself. Its been a problem for a while as i have been sitting on my books for years but have never had the courage to send them off. If i dont do it now i never will, ill percrastinate till the next great idea enters my head!! So to all Bipolar sufferers. I think that we have a gift in some ways, it makes us more creative then others and we should do something with it. If we stick together and help each other it will make life that little bit easier. MWAH xx

Dr. Jamison states a 3rd unknown factor or mystery, which may link creativity and manic depression together. My thoughts too ascend toward spirituality and the Divine Being of God. I often wonder, and tend to believe, to have a sensitive brain with all the wonderous gifts which accompany it, indeed is a gift from God. The real trick is being able to manage the severity of eposides of rapid cycling, and the trama of severe depressions and mania's or and hypomania's. yet, it doesn't extingish the ardent love for life and experimenting in it,and adventuring through it. Even in painfull episodes, attempting to focus energy on learning from it seems helpful and productive.
In this mode of existence of creativity and bipolarity- Life is Sublime and extraordinary! We have lots of help, thanks to Doctors like Jamison and Goldberg. So we are even blessed with experts to help us navagate through the suffering part of this bipolar experience. I thank the Divine Providence and Goodness of God for this help. There is so much life and energy to utilize in this mode of Being, lets remember! Constantly trying to improve ourselfs, ever mindful of affecting the lifes of others.