Throughout history we have witnessed, as humanity, that the relationship between genius and madness has always been very close. Painters, singers, philosophers, writers, actors, great geniuses have been victims of great emotional suffering and have left a record of their stories through diaries and their close ones have also testified to dark behaviors and passions that have led them to commit acts little orthodox Not a few geniuses have also been victims of severe addictions.
Just to give an example, the incidence of suicide and stay in psychiatric hospitals was 20 times higher among the most prominent British and Irish poets between 1600 and 1800, according to what the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison concluded, after conducting a study.
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Without going any further, this is a theory -of the link between madness and genius- that has been supported since ancient times since Plato and Aristotle, around the year 300 BC, had already realized that link. Now, at present, this conjecture has been taken into account by scientists and through various studies the extraordinary levels of creativity, intelligence and even genius possessed by those human beings who suffer from bipolar disorder have been confirmed.
Not a few neuroscientists attribute these extraordinary abilities to the gene DARPP-32the one with a particular variant that increases IQ and memorybut also considerably increases the sad possibility of develop mental disorders.
Why bipolars are smart
According to a study conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry King’s College Londonin the United Kingdom, intelligence is cause of bipolarity and to prove this thesis The intelligence quotient (IQ) of young people between 15 and 17 was measured.
Some time later and already during the boys’ adulthood (when they turned 25), several of them had manic symptomsbeing themselves the ones who had presented an IQ higher by 10 points than those who did not present any mental disorderwhich somehow goes to show that a high IQ it is an indicator to develop a bipolarity in adulthood.
Scholars of the subject point out that those people who suffer from a bipolar disorder have very high energy levels, which is why they can remain concentrated for long periods of time. This contributes to having higher levels of creativity and intelligence, reaching in many cases genius. Likewise, the experts realized that this ability/condition is greater in men than in women.
Without going any further, the psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon told the BBC the following:
«Creativity comes, without a doubt, from not letting ourselves be limited by the rules or accepting the restrictions that society imposes on us.»
«Of course, the more someone breaks the rules, the more likely they are to be perceived as ‘mentally ill,'» he added.
bipolar of history
There are some records that the French ruler Napoleon Bonaparte suffered from bipolarity, just as, in the summer of 1776, the American Revolutionary War was so black for the rebels that George Washingtonapparently tried to take his own life and, according to the BBC, Theodore Roosevelt «it would go down in history as one of the most illustrious psychological examples of the distortion of conscious mental processes,» according to the contemporary Journal of Abnormal Psychology, just to name a few examples.
In painting, we have several iconic examples such as the painter Salvador Dali, Vincent Van Gogh, Italian painter and sculptor Miguel Angel. Also Italian painter Amédeo Modigliani, he also had a severe disorder.
If we turn to writing, there are examples to shoot heaven: the writer Virginia Woolfthe American genius of tales of terror and suspense, Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath (who ended his life by putting his body in the oven to inhale the gas), the British poet John Keats also had a very complicated temperament and to give a more contemporary example, we have the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, who on September 25 in 1972 and at the age of 36, she committed suicide by taking 50 Seconal pills during a weekend in which she was on leave from the psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires where she was an intern.
The polymath Leonardo Da Vinci, the writer Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, the actor Cary Grant and the actor Robin Williams, are just some of the geniuses with emotional disturbances who took their creative levels and genius to its maximum expression.
But this is not a disease of the past and there are great celebrities who also suffer from it today, as is the case of the singers Mariah Carey, Sinead O’Connor, Demi Lovato; actress Catherine Zeta-Jones and actor Mel Gibson among others.