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.”

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

Related Talent Development Resources page: Bipolar disorder

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As Dr. Gary  Small, Direc­tor of UCLA’s Mem­ory Clinic and Cen­ter on Aging, said in an interview, “Our study ‘Your brain on Google: Pat­terns of cere­bral acti­va­tion dur­ing Inter­net search­ing’ (Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Geri­atric Psy­chi­a­try 2009;17:116–126) showed that Inter­net savvy older adults had sig­nif­i­cantly greater neural activ­ity search­ing online com­pared with inter­net naive con­trols.

“Our fol­low up of this study showed that after one week of search­ing, there were sig­nif­i­cant increases in brain activ­ity in the pre­vi­ously naive subjects.”

From Transcript: Dr. Gary Small on Enhancing Memory and the Brain By: SharpBrains, Nov 1, 2011.

Gary Small is author of The Memory Bible: An Innovative Strategy For Keeping Your Brain Young.

Related book: The Sharp Brains Guide to Brain Fitness: 18 Interviews with Scientists, Practical Advice, and Product Reviews, to Keep Your Brain Sharp, by Alvaro Fernandez, Elkhonon Goldberg.

But cognitive health and ability is vital at any age, and crucial for life success and creative thinking.

Using the web may be helpful, but it is a relatively unstructured activity compared with brain training games or cognitive fitness training, such as the programs from Posit Science and Lumosity described below.

Although there are plenty of dubious programs online, these two companies seem to have some of the best scientific confirmation and user testimonials, at least from my research.

Combating decline

A review article on brain training technology in a 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind quoted Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, about how the article author’s cognitive abilities will change (along with the rest of us):

“You’re going to slowly decline in operating speed. Your brain will become noisier and noisier in its processing.”

“Age-related cognitive decline, Merzenich says, is a combination of physical changes and negative brain plasticity. A way to combat that is “to train regularly using any of an increasingly wide range of software products designed expressly for the purpose, says Merzenich, who founded Posit Science, which makes one such package.”

From article: Brain Trainers: A Workout for the Mind, by Kaspar Mossman.

n her Health Section article in the Los Angeles Times (“Healthy holidays, with our gift ideas“  December 12, 2011), Melissa Healy writes:

“Research tells us that for brains as for muscles, it’s either ‘use it or lose it’ — those who are intellectually engaged are less likely to show signs of dementia.

“One of the most affordable, engaging and demonstrably effective sources of brain-training games is Lumosity, produced by the San Francisco-based Lumos Labs. Lumosity’s online games exercise a variety of cognitive skills, including working memory, spatial perception, attention, speed and mental agility.

“They have great graphics and give subscribers excellent feedback to ensure progress. Plus, these games really are undergirded by strong research…

“Other games can be purchased on CD-ROMs, including brain-fitness programs from Posit Science that focus on auditory and visual processing — cognitive skills that directly affect reaction time and working memory.”

Posit Science

The Posit Science site lists research studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Journals of Gerontology and other academic publications. The site also has free brain performance tests.

Testimonials include these two:

Sueann Mark, PhD, found out that she had breast cancer. Chemotherapy saved her life, but it also took a toll on her mental abilities. She was suffering the effects of “chemobrain,” a condition associated with chemotherapy that results in decreased mental function. “I had the attention span of a 2-year-old,” says Dr Mark. “I couldn’t remember appointments, where I put things and I had trouble finding the right word.” Dr. Mark says she started to notice changes just a couple of weeks into the Posit Science training. “My attention span was getting longer. I could read through entire articles that a couple of weeks ago I couldn’t get through. Knowing that I was exercising my mind and reactivating it was really comforting to me.”

As a physician by training, Dr. Greg Robinson, 53, could always count on a sharp mind and keen memory. So when HIV-associated cognitive impairments first developed in his early forties, the contrast was pronounced. “I had short term memory problems so that I couldn’t remember lists of things beyond two or three,” recalls Robinson. “I had difficulty remembering names and getting a hold of common words.” At the end of the training, Robinson was amazed by “the tremendous positive benefits.” His memory returned, his dexterity, his faculty with numbers—all of the cognitive impairments he experienced before were gone or greatly reduced.

The article mentioned above: Brain Trainers: A Workout for the Mind, by Kaspar Mossman, also mentions a Mayo Clinic study of the Brain Fitness Program by Posit Science.

“Encour­agingly, the researchers found that the software boosted the brain in ways unrelated to the training. Rather than simply learning to parrot back what they had practiced, participants improved their test scores across a range of brain functions, says clinical neuropsychologist Glenn Smith, who led the study.

“People who used the program bolstered their working memory—the system that holds information in mind momentarily in tasks such as dialing phone numbers—and processing speed, two assets that deteriorate with age.”

Posit Science site

Posit Science Brain Fitness Program [at Amazon.com]

Lumosity

A recent Fast Company article notes “over 14 million people in 180 countries either subscribe to Lumosity’s website or have downloaded one of its iPhone apps.”

[From Why "Brain Gyms" May Be The Next Big Business, BY E.B. Boyd, Jun 16, 2011.]

“Your brain, in some ways, is like a muscle,” says Tim Chang, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, which invested in Lumos Labs. “It needs to be kept in shape.” Lumosity doesn’t feel like mindless, monotonous work. It’s a game, and it’s captivating, Chang says.

“The part that’s very compelling is the more you play, the more you learn about yourself,” he says. “It’s even more compelling in some ways than the gym.”

From Brain-training games are new exercise craze, By Rachel Roubein, USA TODAY 8/24/2011.

The Lumosity site lists a number of testimonials, including:

“Lumosity’s daily training doesn’t take much time. It’s fun, and I can really see an improvement in my ability to think through and quickly understand new processes in my job.” -Alison B., 20

“I do a Lumosity training session daily and feel the BPI gains at work all the time. I’m much more organized, focused and I maintain better attention because of the work I do on Lumosity. I find this site so incredible that I recommend it to everyone.” -Angela B., 32

Lumosity site

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For example, there are studies indicating writers are more susceptible to depression.

Video from World Science Festival: ‘Genius’ Dark Cousin’ – “When talking about geniuses, the conversation inevitably strays towards topics of eccentricity, or even madness. One needs only to look at the lives of artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Mark Rothko, or to mathematician John Nash (pictured)—whose battle with paranoid schizophrenia was made famous in the film A Beautiful Mind—as examples of the thin line between brilliance and insanity.

“But is there really anything to this idea of the “tortured genius”? Or is it just a romanticized notion exaggerated by film and literature? Philip Glass and Julie Taymor respond to striking data presented by Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist who has studied the nature of genius for decades.”

~ ~

Here is a brief video interview with Shelley Carson, Ph.D. of Harvard University, who teaches and conducts research on creativity, psychopathology, and resilience.

Also listen to my podcast interview: Shelley Carson on enhancing our creative brain

Her book: Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life.

But how valid is the research, and do these notions imply we are more likely to be creative if we have mental health challenges, if we’re unusually neurotic or a bit crazy?

Director Tim Burton may be acclaimed for his films, including “Alice in Wonderland,” but has also been called ‘crazy’ (at least in part for his appearance) or at least ‘eccentric’ – perhaps a polite cover label for ‘mad.’

He has even exploited that sort of reaction, he says: “If you want people to leave you alone then appearing to be crazy is a good thing. If you’re walking down the street talking to yourself people tend to give you a wide berth! But I’ve always been blessed with being easily ignored or avoided. I think maybe it’s because people think I look a little crazy.”

He added, “I have always been an outsider. As a kid I identified with the monsters in the old horror films, like the ‘Creature from the Blue Lagoon’ and ‘Frankenstein’.” [From post 'Crazy' Tim Burton, emusic.tv]

Photo from post Tim Burton on nurturing his unique creative vision

Psychosis

Cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D., addresses this topic in a new post of his.

“I do believe that If the mental processes associated with psychosis were evaporated entirely from this world, art would suck. But so would a lot of other things that require imagination.

He notes that psychosis is on a continuum: “Too much psychosis and one is at high risk of going mad. But everyone engages in psychosis-related thought any time they use their imagination. This type of thought activates particular regions of the brain and is especially prominent while day-dreaming and night-dreaming.”

He thinks that without the “ability to transcend immediate reality, art would lose its creativity. Far from insulting artists, I think it makes us appreciate artists even more, and their ability to show us worlds that many not exist yet, but are possible.”

He asks, “So is extreme, debilitating psychosis a prerequisite for art? Absolutely not. Severe mental illness is nothing to take lightly, and can make it very difficult to produce art.”

In a response to a comment, he explains further: “I do not think a ‘psychotic episode’ is necessary for art, but mental processes such as a reduced latent inhibition can be very useful for art. The continuum aspect is key. Extreme psychosis can lead to a psychotic episode, completely detached from reality. That isn’t very adaptive. But there is a sweet spot in which you still use your imagination but have a healthy foot in reality. That sweet spot is one which is heavily conducive to flow, a state that many artists (and other creative people) seek.”

From his post Is Psychosis a Prerequisite for Art?

Madness

“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.” Edgar Allan Poe

That quote comes from my post Our continuing fascination with creativity and madness which links to the article Creativity, the Arts, and Madness, by Maureen Neihart, Psy.D., who writes:

“The notion that  inspiration requires  regression and dipping into irrationality in order to access unconscious symbols and thought has been popular across disciplines for hundreds of years. Plato said that creativity is a “divine madness…a gift from the gods”.

She adds a quote attributed to Aristotle: “No great genius was without a mixture of insanity.”

But is that really true?

One consequence of accepting this sort of mythology is you may think you have to be ‘crazier’ than you are in order to be a ‘real artist.’

Or, that you should suffer with depression or other mental health challenges, rather than treat them and ‘lose your creative edge.’

Nonsense.

As musician Sting comments, “Do I have to be in pain to write? I thought so, as most of my contemporaries did; you had to be the struggling artist, the tortured, painful, poetic wreck.

“I tried that for a while, and to a certain extent that was successful. I was ‘The King of Pain’ after all. I only know that people who are getting into this archetype of the tortured poet end up really torturing themselves to death.”

From post Pain and suffering and developing creativity

Pathology and creative ability

In his PowerPoint presentation Creativity and Psychopathology [html] [PPT] creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton, PhD notes, “Few creative individuals can be considered truly mentally ill. Indeed, outright disorder usually inhibits rather than helps creative expression. Furthermore, a large proportion of creators exhibit no symptoms, at least not to any measurable degree.”

But he also notes that “because some psychopathological symptoms correlate with several of the characteristics making up the creativity cluster, moderate amounts of these symptoms will be positively associated with creative behavior.”

He explains further that “psychopathology is not the only possible source for the creativity cluster. The environment can also nurture creative development. Although some of these developmental influences are also associated with psychopathology, others are not.”

He concludes, “Psychopathology and creativity are closely related, sharing many traits and antecedents, but they are not identical, and outright psychopathology is negatively associated with creativity.

“This fits what Dryden said about the “thin partition” separating “great wits” and “madness. Or, as the highly creative but not truly crazy Surrealist painter Salvador Dali once expressed the distinction: “The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.”

One of Dean Keith Simonton’s books is Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity

Crazy is hard-wired. Oh, really?

In her article The Continuing Adventures of the Mad Musician and the Bipolar Genius, Dr. Judith Schlesinger covered a lot about this topic, and writes:

“Great talent always comes at a great price. To be a genius means to suffer—if not the chronic paralysis of depression, then surely the emotional whiplash of bipolar disorder. The exquisite sensitivity of creative artists is hard-wired with their pathology; moreover, their willingness to brave the treacherous rapids of the unconscious for inspiration makes them even more vulnerable to psychotic collapse.

“This is the heart of the ‘mad genius’ myth that has been integral to Western culture for centuries.

“It is also hogwash. The fact is that, despite the efforts of numerous investigators and decades of confident pronouncements by a few, there’s still no concrete, empirical proof that highly creative people are any more likely to be mood-disordered than any other group.”

I don’t agree with her opinion of “no empirical evidence” but in her article, she does raise some important criticisms of research, such as that of leading authors like psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison, whom I have quoted a number of times over the years. Here is another quote from her article:

“A careful look at the so-called “landmark” studies in the field—the work by psychiatrists Nancy Andreasen and Arnold Ludwig, and psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison—reveals gaping holes in their design, methodologies, and conclusions.”

Judith Schlesinger, PhD notes she is a “psychologist, author, educator, jazz critic, and musician…” on the site of her book The Insanity Hoax: Exposing the Myth of the Mad Genius.

n the articles linked above, and below, there are many examples of studies linking depression, neuroticism, even psychotic cognition such as in schizophrenia, with creative people.

But this isn’t causal linking – being “crazy” does not make you creative.

If you experience disruptive symptoms, it may mean you should get help, or help yourself, to gain better emotional health so you can be even more productive and creative.

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Related posts and articles:

Creativity, the Arts, and Madness, By Maureen Neihart, Psy.D.

Our continuing fascination with creativity and madness

Creativity and madness: High ability and schizophrenia

On creativity and intelligence, By Dean Keith Simonton, PhD

Highly sensitive people: latent inhibition and creativity – Reduced latent inhibition has been associated with schizophrenia, and creativity.

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Creative expression can transform our painful reactions to traumatic situations, providing a way to give voice to difficult feelings.

Charlize Theron as a teen saw her mother shoot and kill her father in self defense.

She said in a 2004 interview that her work has helped her deal with it: “I think acting has healed me. I get to let it out. I get to say it and feel it in my work and I think that’s why I don’t go through my life walking with this thing, and suffering.”

In a later British newspaper interview she added: “People want to think that I am this tortured soul, that my work is drawn only from this one well.

“And though I would never sit here and say that it didn’t mark me, or mould me into the person that I am, my life has had many painful journeys and heartbreaks since my father died, many of which I draw on for my work.”

Art therapy

Artist Marlene Azoulai writes, “I was first introduced to Art Therapy while in a psychiatric institution. There, I learned that when there are no words, there can be pictures.

“I learned that an artist is not necessarily someone who has studied art, but one who has something to say, and the courage to say it. I learned that an artist is someone who makes art to save her life.”

In her article Giving Life to Carl Rogers Theory of Creativity, therapist Natalie Rogers says that “using the expressive arts gives people a safe place to explore their shadow side…The shadow is the part we have repressed in our lives. Some people have denied their anger and rage for a lifetime.”

Continued in my much longer article The Alchemy of Art: Creative Expression and Healing.

Also see collection of Psychology Today articles: When Art Heals.

Do you use art for healing?

Depression and anxiety are sometimes hard to tell apart. While they may seem like completely different conditions, chronic depression can hide anxiety, while people who suffer from general feelings of anxiety may actually be experiencing a symptom of depression.

Further, when people begin treatment for depression, the new focus on underlying issues sometimes causes anxiety symptoms, such as frequent heart palpitations, agitation and feelings of nervousness.

Which is it?

Many times, the same individual feels depressed and anxious, either at different times or at the same time.

This can make it more challenging to decide whether the main issue is depression or an anxiety disorder.

Symptoms that are the same in both conditions include obsessive thoughts or rumination, panicky feelings, stomach upset and racing heartbeat. …

The goal [of treatment] is to keep levels of mood-regulating neurotransmitters high. While medications can be helpful in this regard, you don’t necessarily need them.

Lifting Mood the Natural Way

Levels of serotonin increase when you exercise, eat a healthy diet and spend time outdoors.

That’s why regular exercise and healthy eating habits are so important for people who suffer from depression and/or anxiety disorders.

Continued in The Link Between Depression And Anxiety

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But many writers and other artists choose the experience of analysis and other forms of therapy as a way to both become healthier and to better access their creative talents…

In her Psychology Today article The Idea That Wouldn’t Die, Molly Knight Raskin discusses how therapy can help access those unconscious creative impulses and other material.

Continued: On The Couch for More Creativity

Creating art has always been a way to channel emotional intensity.

In a world where destructive acting out is all too frequent (and meticulously documented and sensationalized on the news and TMZ), sublimating painful feelings by expressing them in the form of artistic expression allows the artist to choose to “act out” in a way that is constructive.

Many creative people carry the belief that their pain is the locus of their creativity, and worry that they will lose their creativity if they work through their inner conflicts or let go of suffering.

These artists hold onto their pain as if it were a lifeline, even finding ways to enhance it, leading to some patterns of behavior that won’t “turn off” even when they want them to. The “source” becomes the obstacle.

Continued in her article Affect Regulation and the Creative Artist.

[Photo: "King of Pain" musician Sting.]

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Although it is somewhat of a media-influenced stereotype, the cultural image of the “mad genius” has stayed with us, and that’s because many of the qualities attributed to highly successful people (i.e. that they are crazy or insane) are quite true.

Especially for those of us who are creative and active people, we shouldn’t be ashamed if we struggle with problems of a personal nature.

Here are a few people who made it big, but who cope with the same difficulties that many of us creatives sometimes face.

Continued in her article: Method in the Madness: 5 Successful People Who’ve Struggled with Psychiatric Disorders

Also see more Mental health & fitness articles, and a number of posts on mental health.

“Even learning for a short period of time could teach you how to reduce stress, reduce anxiety in different situations,” said clinical psychologist Dr. Susan Harden.”

See more quotes and video from ABC-TV report: “Study shows meditation is powerful medicine to conquer fears” – and video about guided imagery and biofeedback program developed by Doctors Deepak Chopra, Dean Ornish and Andrew Weil, in the post Relaxing Rhythms Guided Training Program.

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Therapist Leslie Davenport on guided imagery :

“I don’t recognize myself: My body doesn’t feel the same at all…Everything has been hijacked: my vitality, my spiritual beliefs…I have no idea who I am anymore. And I’m terrified.” — Daniel

Daniel’s story is familiar to me. Having offered psychotherapy with guided imagery to hundreds of patients with severe illness and injury, I have seen how multiple losses—physical, spiritual, and psychological—stemming from a health crisis deconstruct a core sense of self, leaving them feeling like a stranger in a strange land.

Guided imagery, which incorporates relaxation training, is a natural, meditative process that reliably offers direct access to inner strengths and clarity of mind.

Continued in article Guided Imagery and Psychotherapy in Medicine, by Leslie Davenport, MS, MFT.

It is also potentially a core benefit of counseling or psychotherapy. But what does that really mean: getting out of our own way?

Dennis Palumbo, a writer and a therapist specializing in creative issues, addresses the question:

“If I, the writer, get out of my own way – that is, put my ‘stuff’ aside so I can write – what’s left to write about? My stuff is the raw material of my writing.

“In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and just say it: There is nothing but stuff. Which is great, because that means I’ll never run out of raw material. As long as I’m a human being, I have an inexhaustible supply.”

Continued in The Creative Mind post Our Stuff is the Raw Material.