Did you Dream Last Night?

What is the link between creativity and mental health?

- Jerry Pinto IS AT WORK ON HIS NEXT NOVEL

YOU want to upset someone who works in what is described as a creative profession, talk about the relationship between genius and madness. There are historic reasons for this. First, madness is not a sitting target. Homosexuality was part of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which meant it was seen as a mental disease for decades. And someone who may be seen as a genius at one time may fall out of favour in another age. Here's one example: John Singer Sargent was born in 1856, Vincent van Gogh in 1853. Sargent could hardly keep up with the demand for his work; van Gogh couldn't sell more than a couple of paintings. It is now said that van Gogh might have been suffering from xanthopsia that made him see so many glorious yellows. Doubt has been cast over the story of his suicide. Who would you call a genius? Who would you call a madman?

And yet, and yet. So many poets have committed suicide: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Paul Celan, Randall Jarrell, Berryman, Mayakovsky... Perhaps it is merely a question of how long you can keep digging deep and excavating your inner self to turn into words before you arrive at a place where you have gone too far. Perhaps it is about the constant balancing act between nudity and the dresscapades of words. Perhaps it is about hope, the hope that one will cure oneself with words, and about the despair of discovering that the dark dolphin undertow is still there the next morning. Or perhaps it is also about the neural chemistry of X which will allow him to play with world-building but will plunge Y into despair.

This is not to say that words do not have great curative power. They do. Music, art, all these can affect our moods. But the making of those words may be a different thing altogether. ‘I am not happy when I am painting,’ the artist Mehlli Gobhai would say. ‘I am just a lot less unhappy.’

After my novel,