Creative Writing could Seriously Damage your Health

If you know a writer or an artist tell him to stop!

It should be written above all books, on the canvas:

Attention, aspiring writers/artists: “Art seriously damages your mental health.”

I was reading the interesting article written by Nicola Powes on Medium when I started thinking about one of her statements:

I wonder why the myth persists that artists have to be seen to be struggling — suffering — to be declared legit?

So, I imagined an absurd situation.

Imagine you love to write, but people don’t read your articles.

Nobody buys your books. Maybe some friends pity you away. “Isn’t it too late to play writer?”

Then you may feel a little annoyed, then angry, and finally, you feel overwhelmed by sudden mood changes. And then, here it is, depression.

Of course, this is a science fiction story. I’m sure that’s something you’ve never felt. (Nor did I, but I’ve got a vivid imagination.)

Depression is an unmistakable message from your body: you must change something to return to seeing life’s colors. But you do not change.

Some people are beginning to say that you are not quite normal. Maybe you are a little crazy.

It starts as a rumor, and then someone says to your face: no, maybe you are not “normal.”

Ok, we’re not normal. So what?

What a weird story! For a moment, suppose you do not feel “normal,”: do you know you would be in good company? Many witers and artists suffered for their passion: art (writing, painting…).

Writers

Let’s recall some of the writers.

Charles Baudelaire He is “The cursed” poet who consumed alcohol, absinthe, and drugs. He lived in precarious housing, in debt, with mental instability and suicide attempts. He died at the age of 46.

Edgar Allan Poe Gambling debts alcohol, said of himself that he was insane. He became insane after the death of his wife and various love disappointments.

A few days before his end, doctors picked him up in a delirious state from the streets of Baltimore. The newspapers reported “Congestion of the brain” as the cause of death.

Sergei Esenin Depressed, Esenin committed suicide by hanging in 1925 in a Leningrad hotel: “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye, you are in my heart,” he wrote in blood in his parting verse.

His gesture earned the public disapproval of his friend and colleague Vladimir Majakovsky, who five years later killed himself in turn, upset by the Stalinist drift of the Soviets.

Theodore Roethke This American poet was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.

Jack Kerouac The father of the Beat Generation, is reformed by the US Navy during World War II for schizophrenia and dies young from alcoholism.

Ernest Hemingway Depressed and alcoholic, Hemingway was violent and shot himself in 1961, passing by suicide.

Hunter J. Thompson Hunter was the inventor of “gonzo journalism” impersonated on film by Johnny Depp (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1998), commits suicide in 2005.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008.

Emily Dickinson Emily was isolated, depressed, melancholy (“it seemed to me that my mind split/that my brain split in two”).

Anne Sexton, a poet, committed suicide.

Sylvia Plath Great poet, she committed suicide with her head in a gas oven at age 30 in 1963, after several hospitalizations, electric therapy, psychotropic drugs, and violence from her husband, Ted Hughes, also a poet.

Mariella Mehr Her nomadic ethnic Jenisch parents took her and subjected her to psychiatric treatment under the postwar eugenics program.

Dino Campana Author of The Orphic Songs. He was often committed to an asylum. As a boy, he ran away from home several times to foreign countries, but each trip corresponded with an asylum admission. His mother was sure he was the antichrist.

Alda Merini A poet from Milan struggled with depression and was committed to an asylum. She experiences the despair of hospitalizations and the violence of forty-six electroshocks.

Painters and others

Francis Bacon In 1971, his partner, George Dyer, committed suicide in a Paris hotel; it occurred on the same day that a significant Bacon painting exhibition opened at the Grand Palais. This generated guilt for him, partly because his relationship with Dyer was masochistic and cruel. His art also changed, and Dyer became his favorite subject.

Chaim Soutine Russian painter often dissatisfied and depressed. He destroyed many of his works. Painted subjects such as quartered animal carcasses.Virginia Woolf: possibly suffering from bipolar disorder, she suffered from depression and deep nervous breakdowns. She attempted suicide many times and succeeded on March 28, 1941, by drowning herself in the Ouse River.

Camille Claudel Sculptor with a stormy love affair she formed with her master, the great sculptor Auguste Rodin. Her works show the discomfort she felt at having to share her love with his wife.

She also had a bad relationship with her family. After Rodin refused to marry her, she found herself alone, neither understood nor appreciated.

Impoverished, she locked herself in her studio, where she lived among cats, cobwebs, and marble. She completed her works, destroyed them with hammer blows, and called them valid executions. “Nervous Exhaustion,” they said.

Doctors interned her for 30 years until the day she died. Some say she was not sick; her family wanted to keep her in the asylum. No one attended her funeral.

Francisco Goya Encephalopathy due to lead intoxication, then present in pigments.

Deafness and altered personality, depression, and monsters in his paintings resulted.

Richard Dadd Dadd was a nineteenth-century English painter. He spent many years in an asylum for killing his father with a switchblade during an ordinary walk in the countryside because he mistook him for a prince of darkness who was an enemy of his deity, the great Osiris, to whom he had erected his rented room in London as a shrine.

He thought the task of defending Osiris had been assigned to him by the Sphinx. He drew fairies, pixies, gnomes, little creatures. He had the first signs of mental illness during a trip to Egypt.

Before killing his father, he assaulted several people, with murderous intent, who he believed were plotting against Osiris. He spent 42 years in an asylum and was always painting.

Edvard Munch Norwegian painter. He suffered from schizoid syndrome. He wrote to describe The Cry:

“One evening, I was walking along a path, On one side stood the city, and below me, the fjord. I was tired and sick. I stopped and looked across the fjord. - the sun was setting - the clouds were dyed blood red. I heard a scream go through nature: I could almost hear it. I painted this picture. I painted the clouds like real blood. The colors were screaming.”

Vincent Van Gogh He manifested mental illness before age 30. He had hallucinations and seizures of the epileptic type. He fell into depression, anxiety, and mental confusion. Like many other artists, he used a toxic alcoholic beverage, absinthe.

As everybody knows, a year before his death, after a violent argument with his painter friend Gauguin, he cut off his left ear and gave it to a prostitute. The painter’s health deteriorated. About “Wheatfield with Flight of Crows,” he wrote, “I painted three large canvases. They are vast expanses of wheat under troubled skies, and I had no difficulty expressing the sadness, the extreme loneliness.” In one of these fields, a few days later, he shot himself and died two days later.

Ligabue An Italian painter with dissociative identity disorder, he frequently indulged in dancing, mimicking animals, and making noises and screams, smearing himself with the colors he worked with.

Jackson Pollock Lifelong self-destruction, a parable of excess, alcohol, and psychiatric drugs, a terrible car accident at age 44 on August 11, 1956. He was interned in a mental hospital after he did nothing but repeatedly hit the table with a knife for an entire night.

Louis Wain Painter, at age 57, in 1917, convinced that the flickering light of the cinematograph screen was stealing energy from his brain, he isolated himself and locked himself in his room. Aggressive and violent. In 1924, he went to a hospital for those in need.

Jean Michel Basquiat Drug addicted, Basquiat died at 28 with self-destructive mental disorders. He struggled with the ghosts of his African-American origin and the shadow of his friendship with Andy Warhol.

Mark Rothko Painter, He was severely depressed, committed suicide.

John Nash Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, frequently hospitalized and institutionalized. Schizophrenic. John thought he was the emperor of Antarctica and the left foot of God. Frequently subjected to electroshock and straitjacketed.

All writers and artists are depressed?

Is it possible that all writers and artists have to be depressed? All suicides? What do you say about Picasso, Dalí? Not to mentions great carefree contemporary artists like Banksy or Cattelan?

How many writers are happy even if they haven’t received a boost on Medium?

After all, it’s no accident that art, particularly writing, is suggested as therapy: keeping a diary and expressing one’s emotions in writing (or on canvas) can become an extraordinary healing tool accessible to everyone.

But, please remember: that’s just a science fiction story. We’re not involved.

What’s the moral of this “dark tale”?

Dear Nicola Powes, I don’t know why the cursed artist myth persists. But I know that life was harsh and unfair for most of them. And for most of us as well.

But despite this situation, every day we roll up our sleeves and immerse ourselves in the (digital) ink of our stories, of our literary adventures. Every day.