Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Artists, writers, and other creative individuals may be more genetically predisposed to bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses, according to new research published in the Monday edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience.
In the study, scientists with the genetics company deCODE and a team of colleagues from the US, the UK, Sweden, Iceland, and the Netherlands reported that the genetic factors associated with an increased risk of those conditions are 25 percent more likely to be found in people who work in creative processions, including painters, musicians, and dancers.
The study, which used the genetic and medical data of over 85,000 residents of Iceland, looked for the DNA variants that doubled a person’s risk of schizophrenia and increased the odds that they will develop bipolar disorder by more than one-third. People belonging to various national arts societies were 17 percent more likely than non-members to possess those variants.
Scientific evidence supporting the notion of the “mad genius”
They also examined medical databases from the Netherlands and Sweden, and their analysis of the records of 35,000 men and women found that those who were deemed to be creative either by their job or through a questionnaire were nearly 25-percent more likely to carry variants linked to mental illness than their non-creative counterparts, according to The Guardian.
“To be creative, you have to think differently, and when we are different, we have a tendency to be labeled strange, crazy, and even insane,” said deCODE founder and CEO Dr. Kari Stefansson. “Often, when people are creating something new, they end up straddling between sanity and insanity. I think these results support the old concept of the mad genius.”
“Creativity is a quality that has given us Mozart, Bach, Van Gogh. It’s a quality that is very important for our society. But it comes at a risk to the individual,” Dr. Stefansson added, “and one percent of the population pays the price for it.” That one percent, he said, can develop mental illness based on their genetic factors, life experiences, and environmental influences.
The authors note that their link between these genetic variants for mental illness and creativity is a weak one, The Guardian reported, and that the factors that increase the risk of mental problems explained only about one-fourth of one percent of the variations in individual artistic ability.
Even so, Dr. Stefansson said that the fact that the genetic causes of mental illness and creativity overlap even slightly is fascinating, and that “it means that a lot of the good things we get in life, through creativity, come at a price. It tells me that when it comes to our biology, we have to understand that everything is in some way good and in some way bad.”
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