Hello, my loves,
I haven't given you an update for a long time about my current condition and my CBT journey. Yes, today I'll get in touch again, and what can I say: it has become challenging to answer how you are doing. For me, this question has become so irrelevant that I can no longer reply to it. It's also hard to answer that because I always want to be honest with myself. On the other hand, I can imagine that certain people will probably think how I feel. I don't know to be honest. I don't want to worry about it anymore because everything feels a little easier thanks to my medicine, which has taken complete control of my memory and my brain. What I have found for myself is definitely that I can feel the pain and that I no longer deny myself that I had suicidal thoughts and had this year. It feels weird, but somehow you become friends with this thought at some point, and it clears up a particular state of mind and becomes routine. I no longer feel like telling me what I'm feeling every time. This feeling has become significantly less, and I focus on the silence and loneliness that surrounds me. It makes many things easier if you focus on what is in front of you than if you focus on what is behind you. I rarely feel anything. Even when I inflict wounds on myself or scratch my skin so bloody, I hardly feel anything. I wish I would feel this my whole life, but I know as soon as I stop taking the medicine that it will be different again, and I can't say whether I'm looking forward to it or not. I don't think so. And so I fall asleep every day and am confident that if it is not even reality, I have tears in my eyes and wake up the following day and wonder whether it will be different today or not.
The notion that depression and other forms of mental illness go hand-in-hand with creativity is so prevalent that it gave rise to the terms "tortured artist" and "mad artist." But is this idea just a stereotype, or does it contain a grain of truth?
Painters such as Vincent van Gogh, who famously cut off his ear and ultimately took his life in 1890, contribute to this idea, as does the writer Sylvia Plath died by suicide in 1963. Both artists detailed their mental illness in writing.
Famous Artists and Mental Illness
Van Gogh sent an 1888 letter to his brother Theo, explaining, "I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me. Now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head… at times I have attacks of melancholy and of atrocious remorse."
Plath also wrote about her mental illness, referring to herself as neurotic, depressed, and suicidal in her 1963 semi-autobiographical novel "The Bell Jar." In the book, she wrote,
"I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely, the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat, and I'd cry for a week."
Plath and van Gogh were just two of a very long list of suffering artists. Edvard Munch, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Frida Kahlo are also said to have suffered from depression.
Tortured artists are a group so fabled that researchers have set out to discover if there's a verifiable link between mood disorders and artistic ability, but the results have proven mainly inconclusive.
Some artists are reportedly more likely to be mentally ill than the public, while others are less likely than non-creatives to suffer from mood disorders and psychological problems. Moreover, certain mood disorders appear to have stronger links to creativity than others.
On the other hand, creativity can be a positive outlet for people in mental distress, with art therapy increasingly prescribed for trauma victims. Research has found that writing about painful past events may even temporarily boost one’s immune system.
Since creativity can be healing, people with mood disorders may instinctively turn to art to help themselves cope or heal. In addition, Taylor posits that the nature of creativity leads artists to behave in ways that read as disordered.
