The therapist as muse: greater roles for clinicians in fostering innovation

Recent research on psychological and social factors that facilitate creativity indicates that clinicians can play important roles in fostering innovations crucial for national economic and social well-being. New research evidence indicates that individuals who carry increased liability for certain psychiatric illnesses, such as bipolar disorder (and possibly other disorders such as schizophrenia, as well) may tend to have unusual potential for creative accomplishment--particularly if they do not themselves have severe symptoms. Clinicians' professional skills give them special opportunities to nurture unusual creative potential in such individuals by using various approaches, ranging from more sensitive use of medication to creating special occupational niches in which unusually talented but psychologically vulnerable individuals can flourish. Clinicians are also needed to catalyze interdisciplinary reforms of occupational and educational institutions to remove authoritarian and harshly competitive conditions that discourage creativity and replace them with new social settings that actively foster innovation. Therapists, therefore, have important cultural roles to play in fostering creativity, not only through traditional professional roles, such as treating patients referred to them, but also through more "practice" ones, such as matching individuals with creative temperaments to optimal social settings, or inventing new social organizations. To fill these roles properly, therapists will themselves have to become more innovative in recasting their own professional identifies and responsibilities.