It's not always easy to feel different

Aqui

"People with Mental Illness Enrich Our Lives"

Abraham Lincoln
The revered sixteenth President of the United States suffered from severe and incapacitating depressions that occasionally led to thoughts of suicide, as documented in numerous biographies by Carl Sandburg.
Virginia Woolf
The British novelist who wrote To the Lighthouse and Orlando experienced the mood swings of bipolar disorder characterized by feverish periods of writing and weeks immersed in gloom. Her story is discussed in The Dynamics of Creation by Anthony Storr.
Lionel Aldridge
A defensive end for Vince Lombardi's legendary Green Bay Packers of the 1960's, Aldridge played in two Super Bowls. In the 1970's, he suffered from schizophrenia and was homeless for two and a half years. Until his death in 1998, he gave inspirational talks on his battle against paranoid schizophrenia. His story is the story of numerous newspaper articles.
Eugene O'Neill
The famous playwright, author of Long Day's Journey Into Night and Ah, Wilderness!, suffered from clinical depression, as documented in Eugene O'Neill by Olivia E. Coolidge.
Ludwig van Beethoven
The brilliant composer experienced bipolar disorder, as documented in The Key to Genius: Manic Depression and the Creative Life by D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb.
Gaetano Donizetti
The famous opera singer suffered from bipolar disorder, as documented in Donizetti and the World Opera in Italy, Paris and Vienna in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century by Herbert Weinstock.
Robert Schumann
The "inspired poet of human suffering" experienced bipolar disorder, as discussed in The Dynamics of Creation by Anthony Storr.
Leo Tolstoy
Author of War and Peace, Tolstoy revealed the extent of his own mental illness in the memoir Confession. His experiences is also discussed in The Dynamics of Creation by Anthony Storr and The Inner World of Mental Illness: A Series of First Person Accounts of What It Was Like by Bert Kaplan.
Vaslov Nijinsky
The dancer's battle with schizophrenia is documented in his autobiography, The Diary of Vaslov Nijinksy.
John Keats
The renowned poet's mental illness is documented in The Dynamics of Creation by Anthony Storr and The Broken Brain: The biological Revolution in Psychiatry by Nancy Andreasen, M.D.
Tennessee Williams
The playwright gave a personal account of his struggle with clinical depression in his own Memoirs. His experience is also documented in Five O'Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, 1948-1982; The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams by Donald Spoto, and Tennessee: Cry of the Heart by Dotson.
Vincent Van Gogh
The celebrated artist's bipolar disorder is discussed in The Key to Genius: Manic Depression and the Creative Life by D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb and Dear Theo, The Autobiography of Van Gogh.
Isaac Newton
The scientist's mental illness is discussed in The Dynamics of Creation by Anthony Storr and The Key to Genius: Manic Depression and the Creative Life by D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb.
Ernest Hemingway
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist's suicidal depression is examined in the True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Ernest Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him by Denis Brian.
Sylvia Plath
The poet and novelist ended her lifelong struggle with clinical depresion by taking own life, as reported in A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath by nancy Hunter-Steiner.
Michelangelo
The mental illness of one of the world's greatest artistic geniuses is discussed in The Dynamics of Creation by Anthony Storr.
Winston Churchill
"Had he been a stable and equable man, he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished," wrote Anthony Storr about Churchill's bipolar disorder in Churchill's Black Dog, Kafka's Mice, and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind.
Vivien Leigh
The Gone with the Wind star suffered from mental illness, as documented in Vivien Leigh: A Biography by Ann Edwards.
Jimmy Piersall
The baseball player for the Boston Red Sox who suffered from bipolar disorder detailed his experience in The Truth Hurts.
Patty Duke
The Academy Award-winning actress told of her bipolar disorder in her autobiography and made-for-TV move Call Me Anna and A Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic-Depressive Illness, co-authored by Gloria Hochman.
Charles Dickens
One of the greatest authors in the English language suffered from clinical depression, as documented in The Key to Genius: Manic Depression and the Creative Life by D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb, and Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph by Edgar Johnson.

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Kubla Khan

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

   Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

   The shadow of the dome of pleasure

   Floated midway on the waves;

   Where was heard the mingled measure

   From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

   A damsel with a dulcimer

   In a vision once I saw:

   It was an Abyssinian maid

   And on her dulcimer she played,

   Singing of Mount Abora.

   Could I revive within me

   Her symphony and song,

   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Explicado aqui

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Criatividade e doença mental… Ainda

Salvador Dali

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.
Salvador Dali

A doença mental nem é necessária nem é suficiente para que haja criatividade.
Scott Barry Kauffman

 As the researchers note, these findings are consistent with the idea that more creative people include more events/stimuli in their mental processes than less creative people. But crucially, they found that those scoring high in schizotypy showed a similar pattern of brain activations during creative thinking as the highly creative participants, supporting the idea that overlapping mental processes are implicated in both creativity and psychosis proneness. It seems that the key to creative cognition is opening up the flood gates and letting in as much information as possible. Because you never know: sometimes the most bizarre associations can turn into the most productively creative ideas. Indeed, Shelley Carson and her colleagues found that the most eminent creative achievers among a sample of Harvard undergrads were seven times more likely to have reduced latent inhibition. In other research, they found that students with reduced latent inhibition scored higher in openness to experience, and in my own research I’ve found that reduced latent inhibition is associated with a faith in intuition.
Scott Barry Kauffman

Restlessness

(Mais recentemente, o psiquiatra Hagop Akiskal descobriu que quase dois terços de uma atmosfera de influentes artistas europeus eram bipolares.) A razão para esta correlação, sugere Andreasen, é que os estados maníacos desencadeiam ideias novas nas pessoas enquanto os seus cérebros se agitam com associações remotas. "Quando as pessoas são maníacas, são movidas por uma necessidade intensa, avassaladora, de se exprimirem", afirma Andearsen. "Esse pode ser um estado extremamente desagradável, porqe muitas vezes não conseguem parar de criar." Para além do mais, essas torrentes de imaginação caracterizam-se pela sua natureza radical, por vezes incompreensível. "As pessoas tornam-se muito mais abertas a ideias inesperadas quando são maníacas", salienta Andreasen. "É nesses momentos que têm habitualmente as suas ideias mais originais."
Jonah Lehrer, in Imagine

"Happiness is not creative"*

Na verdade, há indícios que sugerem que a capacidade de concentração incessante num problema criativo pode até fazer-nos sentir miseráveis. Aristóteles foi o primeiro a abordar esse tema, afirmando no século IV a.C. que "todos os homens que atingiram a excelência na filosofia, na poesia, na arte e na política, Mesmo Sócrates e Platão, tinham uma propensão para a melancolia; de facto, alguns sofriam até da doença da melancolia". Essa crença foi recuperada durante o Renascimento, o que levou Milton a exclamar no seu poema "Il Penseroso". [...] Keats escreveu: "Não vês como é necessário um mundo de dor e dificuldades para educar uma inteligência e torná-la uma alma?"
Jonah Lehrer, in Imagine

"being down is not only an intrinsic part of being human, but that it can actually be beneficial."

* Marina Abramovic, aqui.



Modupe Akinola [...], numa das suas mais recentes experiências, pediu a cada participante que fizesse um breve discurso sobre o seu trabalho de sonho. Os estudantes foram selecionados aleatoriamente para condições de reacção positiva ou negativa; na condição de reacção positiva, os discursos eram saudados com sorrisos e acenos de cabeça concordantes, e na condição negativa, recebidos com o franzir de sobrancelhas e acenos negativos. Terminando o discurso, o participante recebia cola, papel e feltro colorido, sendo pedido que fizesse uma colagem com esses materiais. As colagens eram depois avaliadas por artistas profissionais segundo diversos critérios de criatividade.
Não constituiu surpresa o efeito da reação sobre o estado de espírito dos participantes. [...] Os participantes da condição de reação negativa criaram colagens muito mais bonitas. A sua angústia deu origem a uma arte de melhor qualidade. Como salienta Akinola, isso deve-se em grande medida à tristeza ter melhorado a concentração deles e aumentado a sua propensão para serem mais persistentes com o desafio criativo.
Jonah Lehrer, in Imagine 



O aumento destas aptidões mentais durante os estados de tristeza serve também para explicar a surpreendente correlação entre a criatividade e os distúrbios depressivos. [...] – "Existe aquele lugar-comum recorrente sobre a loucura e a genialidade andarem a par".
Jonah Lehrer, in Imagine



[...] Os escritores famosos tinham oito vezes mais probabilidades do que a população geral de sofrer de depressões graves.
Jonah Lehrer, in Imagine