The Door That Leads Into Madness:Eastern European Poets and Mental Illness

Abstract

The image of the poet as a doomed, lonely, depressedfigure is a persistent archetype in our culture. Poetsthemselvesmaynotappreciatesuchassociations—for-mer U. S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, for example, ar-gues “the assumed association of poets with mentaldisorders and depression is a romantic holdover”(quoted in Levin, 2003), and writer CarolMuske-Dukes has said, “The way poets write has noth-ing to do with their health” (quoted in Murillo, 2004).Yet a multitude of research studies have demonstratedsome type of association between mental illness andcreativity, even if there is still much debate over the ex-tent and nature of this relationship (e.g., Jamison,1993; Rothenberg, 1990; Waddell, 1998).Some studies have further specified a link betweencreative writing and mental illness. Andreasen (1987)explored this relationship by comparing writers with acontrol group and found that not only were writersmore likely to suffer from affective disorders (specifi-cally bipolar disorder) but so were the writers’first-de-gree relatives. Ludwig (1994) studied 59 female writ-ers and 59 matched controls. He found that the writerswere more likely to have mental illness, includingmood disorders and general anxieties.Ludwig (1995) also conducted a separatelarge-scale investigation of over 1,000 eminent indi-viduals who were the subjects of major biographieswritten between 1960 and 1990. He found a higher in-cidence of mental illness among those in artistic pro-fessions (e.g., writing, art, and theater) than innonartisticprofessions(e.g.,business,politics,andsci-ence). Jamison (1989) studied British artists and writ-ers and found that a significantly higher percentage ofthem suffered from some form of mental illness thanwould be expected from the rates found in the generalpopulation, with affective disorders again especiallyprevalent. Post (1994, 1996) studied and diagnosedeminent men and found higher rates of personality dis-orders and depression (1994) and mental pathology(1996) in writers.Other research has focused on what