On or about April 24, 2012, an announcement was posted on her site www.sinead-oconnor.com that Sinead O’Connor has had to cancel her tour.

She posted the following note:

“With enormous regret I must announce that I have to cancel all touring for the year as am very unwell due to bi polar disorder.

“As you all know I had a very serious breakdown between December and  March  and I had been advised by my doctor not to go on tour but didn’t  want to ‘fail’ or let anyone down as the tour was already booked to  coincide with album release.

“So very stupidly I ignored his advice to my  great detriment, attempting to be stronger than I actually am. I apologise sincerely for any difficulties this may cause.”

~~~~

Like many people, she has been dealing with depression for years. This is my 2007 post:

“She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, or manic depression. O’Connor describes the illness as like having a gaping hole in the centre of her being… The diagnosis, and then the drugs, gave her back her creativity.”

Excerpted from the article “Sinead O’Connor talks music, mental illness and men,” by Sheryl Garratt [London Times] :

The new album, Theology, is her first to feature new songs for seven years. In 2003.. she announced she was giving up music completely… When I ask why, she comes up with a variety of answers: her manager of 12 years, Steve Fargnoli, had just died and she didn’t want to replace him.

“I got into the pop thing very young… I was 17 when I signed my deal and I came to feel that I hadn’t formed an identity of my own. I was quite disillusioned, and also, I was tired of carrying the weight of the whole “controversial Sinead O’Connor” crap.

“That’s a painful, difficult thing to carry, and I felt I couldn’t work without having to deal with that. So I decided to just come away from it all. I didn’t have a nanny or any help in the house, I just looked after the kids. It was great!”

Everyone but her, it seems, knew she’d come back to music eventually. And she has, but first she needed to find her way through something far darker. Ever since she was 23, she says, she’d had thoughts of suicide.

“I began to have this quiet little voice every now and then – although ‘voice’ is the wrong way to put it. It’s your own thoughts just gone completely skew-whiff: ‘Look at that tree, you might hang yourself on it.’ Until the volume went up so loud that I took myself to hospital.

“There would be nothing wrong in your life, but you’d think about suicide all the time. It was almost funny. But after Shane was born I was really ill, and I was really worried because I was close to actually doing it. So when he was about about five months old, I took myself to hospital.”

She’d been to hospital before, a couple of times, but says they just left her crying in a bed for a week or so before discharging her. She’d also been to various therapists – including one, in London, whom she saw five times a week for well over a year.

But this time she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, or manic depression. O’Connor describes the illness as like having a gaping hole in the centre of her being. She took the drugs she’d been prescribed, she smiles, “And within half an hour it was like cement going over the hole.”

When she gave up music, she got rid of all her instruments. “I never even looked at a guitar, there was nothing in the house.”

But straight after leaving the doctor’s office, she bought the piano that now sits in her kitchen. The diagnosis, and then the drugs, gave her back her creativity.

It wasn’t all so immediate, she says. Full recovery has taken time, and there have been setbacks: while pregnant with Yeshua she stopped taking the drugs, and afterwards she didn’t go back on them. “I was hoping that perhaps the thing would disappear and I’d be grand, but I wasn’t. So I’ve been back on them now since he was eight weeks.”

It seems to me that her illness could explain much of the behaviour that has got her into trouble over the years. Subsequent revelations have shown she was right to link some elements of the Catholic Church to child abuse, but ripping up a picture of the Pope on live US television probably wasn’t the most career-savvy way to express those concerns, for instance.

Yet she isn’t interested in wiping the slate clean. “I don’t want anyone looking at things that Sinead O’Connor has done – the Pope thing, or any other f***ing thing – and saying that those are the result of being manic depressive, because I don’t believe that. Those are things that I stand by and am proud of and would do again if I had the time over.”

But the suicidal thoughts were part of her illness, she says, and the drugs have taken them away. I point at the tree outside the window. So when you look at that now? She smiles, and it lights up her whole face. “I think, What a gorgeous tree!”

I wonder if she feels angry that so many professionals failed to notice that she was suffering from a treatable medical condition, and she shrugs and says that when she went into therapy she was young, and stupid – and famous, and rich. “I don’t so much get pissed off, I get sad about it.”

Source: The Times [UK] June 16, 2007.

Photo by Kevin Abosch from beliefnet article: Sinead O’Connor’s Act of Love.

Her new album is “Theology”
~~

Depression and Creativity site – more articles and resources for managing depression

Related Talent Development Resources page: Bipolar disorder

~~~

In an interview for NPR radio, science writer Jonah Lehrer commented, “One of the surprising things that’s emerged from the study of moods…is that putting [people] in a bad mood — making them a little bit sad or melancholy — comes with some cognitive benefits.

“So sadness, although it is not fun and is not pleasant, it does sharpen the mind a little bit… people suffering from various kinds of depression [may have increased] creative output.”

Kay Redfield Jamison, MD notes in her book “Touched with Fire” that the majority of people suffering from mood disorder do not possess extraordinary imagination, and most accomplished artists do not suffer from recurring mood swings.

But, she adds, “All the same, recent studies indicate that a high number of established artists – far more than could be expected by chance – meet the diagnostic criteria for manic-depression or major depression…”

Not everyone agrees with the kinds of statements that Jamison and others make about a correlation between creativity and mood disorders.

Continued: Can Mood Swings Enhance Our Creativity?

~~~

Too much black bile was thought to cause ‘melancholy’ and ‘madness.’

In her article “Clinical Depression Then and Now,” Patricia Waldron, M.D. noted, “Dürer’s energy and talent clearly turned periods of depression into an exploration of the inner self, which combined with his careful observation of the external world, resulted in works such as this splendid engraving.”

She also noted, “Because it involved cogitation and introspection, the state of melancholy became associated with the creative person. The philosopher Plato first postulated the notion that melancholy often followed ‘the Divine Frenzy’ of creativity.”

Although many of us have found that creative expression can help deal with depressive feelings, a number of writers and psychologists are questioning the validity of the long history of associating depression with creativity.

Continued: Rethinking Creativity and Depression

~ ~

“I think most human beings go through some sort of depression in their life. And if they don’t, that’s weird.” Kirsten Dunst

From an article by Josh Patner in Flare magazine, which continues:

Dunst speaks from experience: In 2008, she checked into a rehab center in Utah to be treated for crippling depression.

Things started unraveling in 2006 when critics tore apart Marie Antoinette, which starred Dunst as the French queen.

“The movie was so personal to me, and it was like everyone was stomping on my heart.”

More flops followed, as did a breakup with her boyfriend. But she found herself unable to talk about her pain.

“And because of what I do for a living, I had to keep giving. It can dissolve you.”

Continued: Kirsten Dunst: Dealing With Depression.

In her article Depressed Creativity, nochnoch (Enoch Li) admits that, like many people, she never thought she “had any creativity.” Here are some excerpts from the article:

I equated creativity with artists, innovators, entrepreneurs, designers, fashion… I was none of that – until I sunk into depression last year.

And over the course of a few months, I rediscovered my creativity, which spurred my recovery.

I had always classified myself as ‘not creative’ till I met my fiancé. He could visualize colours, designs, and spaces. He made little crafts and redecorated the home. He had innovative ideas for businesses.

Equally, his friend, a graffiti artist and graphic designer, is what I call creative – all the scribbling and sketches that magically appeared on the canvas. I was in awe.

But it was a limiting belief that I was not creative myself.

Out of many disguised blessings from the period of illness, one is rediscovering my creativity. I say ‘rediscovering’ because in fact I was creative when I was younger – I constructed mumble-jumble poems, short stories, drawings, even a book about Mr Caterpillar having too many feet when I was just 5 years old. I made bookmarks, and ‘laminated’ them with my special tape, I made clothes for Barbie, and I made up stories for my bears.

This is all creativity at play. It’s in the heart somewhere.

Continued in her article Depressed Creativity.

~ ~ ~

Related book: The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path Through Depression, by Eric Maisel, PhD

Related pages and sections:

Healing & Art

Depression and Creativity site

Also see Depression Relief Products / Programs and Depression relief resources

The title of a recent Daily Mail [UK] article by Jane Fryer was “A life in fashion: Alexander McQueen was the hooligan of the catwalk who loved to shock – but nothing could take away from his genius.”

The article says, “Victoria Beckham was just one of a galaxy of stars who yesterday paid tribute to Alexander McQueen, the East End boy whose breathtaking creations were adored the world over. She described him as a ‘master of fashion, creative genius and an inspiration.’”

Another news article about his life and death by suicide was “A Renegade Whose Talent Taunted Convention” [By Guy Trebay, New York Times February 11, 2010] – which included the comment: “McQueen was probably the best woman’s tailor in the world,” said Steven Cox, one of two designers of the Duckie Brown label, calling Mr. McQueen, the son of a taxi driver, a “working-class bloke” with a renegade instinct.

The article added, “Mr. McQueen made no secret of his tendency to binge on drugs, alcohol, food and sex. And some observers of his career found it possible to remark about his death much as Tim Blanks, a critic for Style.com, did. “I was thunderstruck by the news,” Mr. Blanks said, “and then not.”

I don’t know much about McQueen, other than what has been reported in a few articles I have read. I am not even a fan of most of his dress designs I see in these articles – I prefer fashion that celebrates female power and beauty without grotesquerie.

But I am concerned about how drug (including alcohol) misuse can hurt gifted and talented people.

What caught my attention was that about the same time of these reports of his death, I added this article to the AddictionInfo site (which I help edit): Beliefs about suicide in depressed individuals with alcohol use disorders.

The article reports on a study at Columbia University. Here is an excerpt:

“The key finding in this study, as indicated by the authors, was that individuals with AUDs [alcohol use disorders] had fewer moral objections to suicide than did individuals without AUDs.

“Additionally, a lack of moral objections to suicide was associated with higher levels of suicidal ideation and prior suicidal behavior. The authors were careful not to overstate the implications of their findings, but the general assumption was that the lack of moral objections facilitates suicidal behavior in individuals with AUDs.”

A hedonistic lifestyle

Of course, I am not saying McQueen was an alcoholic, but his lifestyle raises the question.

In addition to the quote above – “his tendency to binge on drugs, alcohol” – another Daily Mail article reports, “McQueen’s former ‘husband’, George Forsyth says: ‘We went to all these mad parties. There were parties every night. There would be ice sculptures and expensive champagne and people jumping into swimming pools fully dressed, and drugs.

‘Not quite the Hollywood cliche of mountains of coke spread about, but there were a few parties where it was being passed around on silver salvers.

‘The hedonistic parties would go on and on. People had a lot of money so they never had to stop. It was a very incestuous, cliquey world. There was Sadie Frost, Kate Moss and Davinia Taylor in a clique.

‘They were hard-core – staying up for days, either drinking or taking drugs, in some cases both. The drugs magnified everything. The good times were really, really good.’”

> From article Alexander McQueen’s ex-partner throws a disturbing light on the ‘hangers-on’ who lionised him, but who never truly knew him, By Laura Collins, dailymail.co.uk

Also see my article Gifted, Talented, Addicted

and my site: Depression and Creativity

creativity and depression, artists and depression, artists and drugs, artists and suicide

“And, what better way to care for your heart than to give yourself more tools to deal with those inevitable times during the writer’s life that get you down.”

From her post The Writer’s Life – Depression & Creativity – which includes a number of Ideas For Dealing With Depression & Our Creativity – even several links to my own posts. Thanks.

Here are a couple of related posts on The Inner Writer :

Amy Tan on Writing and Depression, and Using What is Beyond Our Ordinary Senses

J.K. Rowling on Writing and Depression

creativity and depression, writing and depression, artists and depression, psychology of creativity, creative mind

“If I can give just one person hope that there’s an end to depression, that it is treatable, then that made it worth it for me to write the book.”

From post [with 2 videos] Therese Borchard and Beyond Blue – Creativity and Mood Disorders

Peter D. Kramer, clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University, notes “Diagnostic labels are proliferating, and mental disorders seem to be annexing ever more territory. At the same time, many people with diagnosable conditions are forging their own original takes on what’s normal.”

He is author of “Listening to Prozac” and “Against Depression,” among other books, and expands on the above in his Psychology Today article What Is Normal?

Dr. Kramer writes, “I have been thinking a good deal about normality lately. It’s a concern in the medical world. The complaint is that doctors are abusing the privilege… to define the normal. Ordinary sadness, critics say, has been engulfed by depression. Boyishness stands in the shadow of attention deficits. Social phobia has engineered a hostile takeover of shyness.

“A spate of popular books—The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, The Last Normal Child by Lawrence H. Diller, and Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness by Christopher Lane—challenge what they believe is psychiatry’s narrowing of the normal. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that in any given year, over a quarter of Americans—and over a lifetime, half of us—suffer a mental disorder.”

One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The concept of normality

He continues, “The fate of normality is very much in the balance. The American Psychiatric Association is now revising its diagnostic and statistical manual—the next version, DSM-V, should preview in 2011 and become official the following year. It may, indeed, be that as labels proliferate, mental disorders will annex ever more territory.

“But claims of a psychiatric power grab are overstated. The real force behind a proliferation of labels is the increasing ability of technology to see us as we’ve never been seen before. Still, the notion of a shift in the normal invites unease: To constrain normality is to induce conformity. To expand diagnosis is to induce anxiety. Is anyone really well?”

Dr. Kramer quotes Christopher Lane: “We’ve narrowed healthy behavior so dramatically that our quirks and eccentricities—the normal emotional range of adolescence and adulthood—have become problems we fear and expect drugs to fix.”

Cosmetic psychopharmacology

Kramer says, “Psychiatry’s critics also complain that doctors medicate patients who meet no diagnosis, who practice what I have dubbed ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology,’ to move a person from one normal, but disfavored personality state, like humility and diffidence, to another normal, but rewarded state, like self-assertion.”

Rejecting the “platform of inadequacy”

Here is a profile from the Psychology Today article – in a section titled Redefining “Normal” :

Donna Flagg, 45, is founder and CEO of the Krysalis Group, New York-based business consultants whose motto is “Business NOT as usual.” “Everything we do challenges the status quo,” says Flagg, who early on—dyslexic and labeled retarded—was sensitized to looking at everything in novel ways.

“Most people think there’s only one way of doing things.” The only time she ever struggled, she says, was in grades K-12. “Once I got out of the system, I was free; paths opened.”

rained to be a dancer, she took a side job doing makeup at Chanel—and discovered she loved the business world. After starting her own beauty company, she opted for a second chance at school and got straight As on a master’s degree at New York University.

“I have two businesses, two master’s degrees, I wrote a book. How do you call me disabled? What’s not normal about what I’ve been able to do?” Flagg thinks “people confuse normal with average. Why would anyone want to be average?” She believes our society “creates a lot of things that don’t fit.” What makes her different, she insists, is that she has chosen not to work from a “platform of inadequacy.”

> For more on dyslexia, autism, visual-spatial learning etc and creative talent, see the page Learning differences.

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.

The inner turmoil of personal evolution and change

Dan Millman, author of Way of the Peaceful Warrior, has commented: “Every positive change—every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness—involves a rite of passage.

“Each time to ascend to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must go through a period of discomfort, of initiation. I have never found an exception.”

This kind of “discomfort” may be particularly intense for those with high ability and high sensitivity.

Kazimierz Dabrowski, MD, PhD, studied many gifted and talented people, and said “Almost 97 percent of the highly creative suffer from different kinds of overexcitabilities, neuroses, and psychoneuroses. They are a mine of social treasure.

“If their emotionality, talents, interests, and sensitivity were discovered at an early age, society and science would profit.”

> From the page Dabrowski / advanced development.

More on advanced development and being ‘neurotic’

In their article Misdiagnosis of the Gifted, counselors Lynne Azpeitia, M.A. and Mary Rocamora, M.A. note “Gifted individuals face many challenges. One of them may be in getting correctly identified by psychotherapists and others as gifted.

“It’s well known among researchers of the gifted, talented and creative that these individuals exhibit greater intensity and increased levels of emotional, imaginational, intellectual, sensual and psychomotor excitability and that this is a normal pattern of development.

“It is because these gifted children and adults have a finely tuned psychological structure and an organized awareness that they experience all of life differently and more Intensely than those around them.

“These characteristics, however, are frequently perceived by psychotherapists and others as evidence of a mental disturbance because most of the population lacks accurate information about the special characteristics of gifted individuals, couples and families.”

> Related book: Misdiagnosis And Dual Diagnoses Of Gifted Children And Adults: ADHD, Bipolar, Ocd, Asperger’s, Depression, And Other Disorders – by James T. Webb, PhD.

What do we do about being “crazy”

Woody Allen admits he has “a lot of neurotic habits. I don’t like to go into elevators, I don’t go through tunnels, I like the drain in the shower to be in the corner and not in the middle.” [From the page Dysfunction / disorder]

Allen says of his childhood: “You know, when I think about it, it’s so clear why I’m so neurotic and I’ve had such a neurotic life.

“Think of the number of times I changed schools and moved around, having to get acclimated to new friends and new schools and liking it or hating it – usually hating it – and then pulling up stakes and going to another place and having to get acclimated to… a new school and then doing that again and again.”

[From Lax, Eric. Woody Allen. A Biography.]

A prolific writer and director, Woody Allen used his “disorders” to create richly memorable and meaningful – and, of course, funny – stories.

Other artists also make use of their own psyches whatever condition they are in – neurotic, dysfunctional, psychotic – or more or less normal.

One of my responses to Dr. Kramer’s and other’s comments about the pathologizing of normality is to realize we can probably do ourselves a service by just letting ourselves be who we are, and consciously distancing from any labels about how we are deficient or wrong.

Of course, if anxiety or depression or phobia or compulsive cleaning is interfering with your joy and creativity, do something about it.

But – to use a rather archaic term that I still think is kind of fun – we are all neurotic. In our own ways. So what?

~~~~

Sources of clips in video – plus some related material :

clip from The Big Bang Theory – episode: The Maternal Congruence (with Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons and Christine Baranski). cbs.com

clip from video: Mad Pride Subvertise 03 [excerpt]
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX0J2pGDSMY

clip from video: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0KLbYjWBUY

Andrew Solomon is author of The Noonday Demon. By his mid-twenties, Andrew Solomon earned international accolades for his work as a novelist, journalist and historian. At 31 he experienced a major depression, and was helped by a combination of family support, medications and talk therapy.

See post/article: Andrew Solomon on depression and hope.

Therese J. Borchard is the author of the blog “Beyond Blue” on Beliefnet.com, and uses spiritual and cognitive behavioral therapy in dealing with her depression.

See a video in post: Beyond Blue: On Creativity and Mood Disorders

She is author of Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression & Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes.

Borchard also recommends the book You Mean I Don’t Have to Feel This Way?: New Help for Depression, Anxiety, and Addiction, by Colette Dowling.

In her post 10 Good Things About Depression, Borchard details some of the ways a mood disorder can be something other than a “disease” to be only and immediately medicated away or otherwise suppressed with extreme prejudice.

Here is part of one of her good things: “Now I know that going public with a nervous breakdown and describing in detail one’s psychiatric chart online and in the pages of a book is not a good career move for most people.

“So I suggest you think long and hard about pulling my stunt. But here’s the thing, my mood disorder has been good for my writing because I don’t care as much what other people think. If I did, do you think I’d let folks get a sneak peak into my neurotic brain?

“Most of that caring about other people’s opinions was fortunately left inside the walls of the psych ward.

“I walked out of that place able to pen the real stuff, the good stuff, the material oozing from my very heart and soul.”

Read the rest – she helps you see the humor in it all, and the hope.

mental health enhancing, mental health books, creativity and mental illness, talent and mental illness

One source of that fear can be the widely-accepted notion that artists are likely to be mentally “unhinged” more than other groups of people, that “creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked.” She goes on to ask if people in the audience are “cool with that idea.”

It is an important question to ask if you want to create, to be an artist of any sort.

She is author of Eat, Pray, Love – a New York Times Best Seller memoir of her spiritual and personal exploration while traveling abroad.

Her new first novel is Stern Men.

On her site www.elizabethgilbert.com she provides “Some Thoughts on Writing.”

Here is an excerpt – these are, it seems to me, powerful and helpful ideas for enhancing creativity and nurturing your life as a creator.

As for discipline – it’s important, but sort of over-rated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness.

Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you. You will make vows: “I’m going to write for an hour every day,” and then you won’t do it. You will think: “I suck, I’m such a failure. I’m washed-up.”

Continuing to write after that heartache of disappointment doesn’t take only discipline, but also self-forgiveness (which comes from a place of kind and encouraging and motherly love).

The other thing to realize is that all writers think they suck. When I was writing “Eat, Pray, Love”, I had just as a strong a mantra of THIS SUCKS ringing through my head as anyone does when they write anything.

But I had a clarion moment of truth during the process of that book. One day, when I was agonizing over how utterly bad my writing felt, I realized: “That’s actually not my problem.” The point I realized was this – I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows.

I have a friend who’s an Italian filmmaker of great artistic sensibility. After years of struggling to get his films made, he sent an anguished letter to his hero, the brilliant (and perhaps half-insane) German filmmaker Werner Herzog.

My friend complained about how difficult it is these days to be an independent filmmaker, how hard it is to find government arts grants, how the audiences have all been ruined by Hollywood and how the world has lost its taste…etc, etc.

Herzog wrote back a personal letter to my friend that essentially ran along these lines: “Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you have to, but stop whining and get back to work.”

I repeat those words back to myself whenever I start to feel resentful, entitled, competitive or unappreciated with regard to my writing: “It’s not the world’s fault that you want to be an artist…now get back to work.”

Always, at the end of the day, the important thing is only and always that: Get back to work. This is a path for the courageous and the faithful. You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place. //

In the end, I love this work. I have always loved this work. My suggestion is that you start with the love and then work very hard and try to let go of the results.

Cast out your will, and then cut the line. Please try, also, not to go totally freaking insane in the process. Insanity is a very tempting path for artists, but we don’t need any more of that in the world at the moment, so please resist your call to insanity.

We need more creation, not more destruction.

We need our artists more than ever, and we need them to be stable, steadfast, honorable and brave – they are our soldiers, our hope.

If you decide to write, then you must do it, as Balzac said, “like a miner buried under a fallen roof.”

Become a knight, a force of diligence and faith. I don’t know how else to do it except that way.

As the great poet Jack Gilbert said once to young writer, when she asked him for advice about her own poems: “Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say YES.”

Good luck.

~~~~~

Gilbert writes:  “Insanity is a very tempting path for artists.”

That is a provocative idea – implying that there is an element of choice in our mental health.

There probably is – more than I have been willing to acknowledge in my bouts of anxiety and depression, seeking solace over the years from talk therapy and prescriptions – which have been helpful at times – or “controlled substances.” And I still take St. John’s Wort, believing the literature that it relieves mild depression.

But I have come to see there is also an element of habit, of predisposition of my attitudes and reactions to so-called “depressing” or “anxiety-producing” situations in my life, and that the focus and tone of my thinking can have a deep impact on my emotional health.

For a variety of perspectives on mental health and creating, on being a creator with anxiety, depression and other challenges, see these sites and pages, among many others on this site :

Depression and Creativity

Mental health & fitness articles

Anxiety articles

Anxiety Relief Solutions

The Inner Writer

creativity and depression, creativity and mental health, creativity and anxiety, writing and attitude, Elizabeth Gilbert