CREATIVE DEPRESSION:
A Curious Facilitator

That depression nurtures creativity in certain writers is well documented. Many of our most creative artists have been motivated and sometimes destroyed by their depression – perhaps the ultimate creative act. Recent studies have shown that writers are four times more likely than others to suffer from affective disorders, particularly manic depression. Dickinson, Eliot, and Poe are among the many poets who suffered from an affective illness. Writers such as Balzac, Conrad, Dickens, Emerson, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Ibsen, Melville, and Tolstoy also suffered from the illness. John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf are among those who eventually imploded, extinguishing their blazing bright light, overwhelmed, perhaps, by their own reality.

Creative writing has been the landscape on which many artists have struggled with their demons, needing to tell a story that could only be told from the dark room of despair. To be sure, not every one who experiences depression will write poetry or the great novel, nor is every one who writes depressed, but there is that symbiotic connection that provides the spark that fires the poetic soul.

What is that spark?

Perhaps, depression breaks down our emotional defenses, the well learned posture against personal pain or the unvarnished truth which, in so many people who write, is pain. Perhaps the depressed writer is able to look down into the deepest well of his being and see clearly that which is at the bottom drowning, needing desperately to be resuscitated. Think of a depressed person's posture: physically or emotionally bent over, head down. What the writer sees holding this posture is what the rest of the world simply steps over or steps on. And so the reader, is given a lesson in stark reality, snapshots of naked truths that rise, sometimes, to the level of superlative if not stormy artistry. In the storm some creaky, secret door opens and words flow, the keyboard clatters and something exciting and wonderful takes form.

What if these writers were to seek, instead, an even keeled existence, unable to cope with a half empty glass. What if they began taking the usual medications for depression, would the squeaky door close, the muse take flight? Many say "Yes". Finding an emotional balance in one's life can be and often is costly in terms of creative writing. More than one writer has indicated that the ability to focus on gut issues, those hard dark truths that find expression through a writer's hand, is diminished. The deep well is empty, the storm passed.

Who is to say what the right course is? How do we come to terms with this paradoxical existence? Only the writer can decide. Only the writer knows what he or she needs to venture onto that fabulous landscape of words which feeds us, nurtures our very soul.