A Beautiful Mind?

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about an article I've just read on the BBC's website entitled, "Creative Minds Mimic Schizophrenia". Whilst not professing to be akin to the likes of Virginia Woolf or John Nash, nonetheless I would like to consider myself a fairly creative individual, and to have something that I had always considered to be a positive trait compared to a mental illness is just a little bit...confusing. Still, I'd also consider myself a scientist, and it's rather hard to argue with the facts. That is, after all, as Thomas Huxley observed, "The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis with an ugly fact."

Psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon states in the article, "Creativity is certainly about not being constrained by rules or accepting the restrictions that society places on us. Of course, the more people break the rules, the more likely they are to be perceived as 'mentally ill'."

Mmm. So what does that say about the more creative thinkers such as Stephen King, H.P Lovecraft, Jules Verne, James Herbert, and the hundreds of other literary geniuses who have had such a huge impact and influence on society to the extent where their ideas have almost been ingrained into the social conscience? Writing is all about making things up for a living, and the wilder and wackier the ideas, the more one would be thought of as 'mentally ill', I suppose. Slightly worrying.

Writing inherently involves having an active fantasy life, after all, which may result from a tendency toward inner reflection rather than outward stimulation, but the defining difference between a writer and a schizophrenic is that the writer, hopefully, has developed a slightly more healthy approach to dealing with their "lack of D2 receptors". Surely that's not such a bad thing? Even if it is a form of escapism from reality that the writer, consciously or unconsciously, is seeking.

It's certainly something to ponder on the next time I get a creative urge. Perhaps I should get one of those plaques to put above my desk: "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps."