Review: bipolar disorder and poetic genius

"We of the craft (poets) are all crazy," remarked the 18th century British romanticist Lord Byron (George Gordon) about himself and his fellow poets. Implied in this statement is the notion that there exists a special kind of relationship between poets and being "crazy". A relationship between psychopathology and the artistic temperament is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural notions; it is also one of the most contentious and controversial. The purpose of this exposition is to investigate if a correlation between bipolar disorder and poetic genius really does exist.

A literature search was conducted along with a review of Professor Jamison's treatise Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. A detailed case study of Lord Byron was also performed in order to gain a qualitative insight into the psyche of a notorious poet who was alleged to suffer from bipolar disorder.

Recent research employing systematic and biographical methodology has given strong support to a much higher rate of mood disorders in artistic populations than could be expected from chance alone. A British study spearheaded by Professor Jamison on living writers and artists revealed many overlapping mood, cognitive, and behavioral changes between hypomania and intense creative states. In the case of Lord Byron, the clinical hallmark of manic-depressive illness is its recurrent, episodic nature, which Byron had in an almost textbook manner. Byron also had a family history remarkable for its suicide in itself more likely to be associated with bipolar disorder than with any other condition.

Not all writers and artists suffer from major mood disorders. Likewise, most people who have a major mood disorder are not writers or artists. It seems counterintuitive that melancholy could be associated with artistic inspiration and productivity; the milder manic states would seem, at first thought, to be more obviously linked. In the case of Lord Byron, his temperament made him exquisitely responsive to virtually everything in his physical and psychological world; it gave him much of his great capacity for passion and understanding, as well as for suffering thus giving credence to the notion that there exists a correlation between bipolar disorder and poetic genius.