All in the mind

The cliché of the ‘mad genius’ has long perpetuated the idea that creativity and mental illness are linked. But, asks Rebecca Franks, how true is that notion?

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No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.’ That was the view of Aristotle. It’s a powerful idea that has travelled down the ages. Tales of creative artists who have experienced mental illness are hardwired into western culture. ‘I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process,’ proclaimed Vincent Van Gogh, a quote that has been turned into a thousand internet memes. Look online and you'll find quotes offering variations on the ‘mad genius’ theme aplenty, whether they're words from Virginia Woolf (‘Madness is terrific, I can assure you… in its lava, I still find most of the things I wrote about’) or John Lennon (‘I can’t be mad because nobody's put me away; therefore I'm a genius.’).

When it comes to classical music, the image of the suffering artist has stuck, too. In part, because it seems, on the surface at least, that there are dozens of historical composers who experienced a range of mental health issues. A brief, non-exhaustive sample gives us: alcoholism (Mussorgsky, Sibelius, Weelkes, Schubert), depression (Rossini, Monteverdi, Debussy), bipolar disorder (Robert Schumann), schizophrenia (Gurney), OCD (Bruckner), eating disorders (Handel), phobias (Schoenberg).