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Anne Skyvington

The Art of Creative Writing

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Psychology

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Emotions and HealthExistencePsychologyWriting

Creativity and Mental Illness

I came across Nancy Andreason in 2014 while researching the brain, to assist me in writing the next chapter of my novel-in-progress: about a young gifted boy who suffers a traumatic brain injury. Creativity is also a theme in the novel.

Nancy Andreason has spent decades researching the brain and what constitutes creativity; and the connection between creativity and mental illness. She states that a high IQ does not correspond to creative genius; in fact, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, all creative geniuses, were college dropouts.

While reading English at the Iowa University, she was able to interview and study the personalities of well-known creative people. This is the site of the famous Writers’ Studio, where she came in contact with dozens of well-known writers, Kurt Vonnegut , Richard Yates, John Cheever, and George Lucas, and she also studied famous creative thinkers from the past: Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolfe, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, Einstein and others.

She discovered that creativity ran in families, and that it was often accompanied by mental illness, often mood disorders, such as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, as well as alcoholism; and that relatives often suffered from schizophrenia. Eighty percent of the creative group were so afflicted compared with thirty percent of the control group.

Neil Simon told her: “I don’t write consciously—it is as if the muse sits on my shoulder” and “I slip into a state that is apart from reality.” And she mentions the example from history of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who  once described how he composed an entire 300-line poem about Kubla Khan while in an opiate-induced, dreamlike state, and began writing it down when he awoke; he said he then lost most of it when he got interrupted and called away on an errand—thus the finished poem he published was but a fragment of what originally came to him in his dreamlike state.

 She concludes from her (still ongoing research) that creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.

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Creativity and Mental Illness was last modified: February 18th, 2021 by Anne Skyvington
September 29, 2014 0 comment
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Psychology

A Modern True Story

We were so close … you were my golden angel! How could I have let this happen? Was it all my fault? Our faults?

Of course not, it was no one’s fault. But that’s the first thought that you have … at the time of the diagnosis. And for a long time afterwards, too. It’s natural to blame yourself initially. After all, there’s a lot of stigma and ignorance surrounding mental illness in society.

I’d struggled myself with ongoing emotional difficulties during most of my childhood and adolescence.  That is, until I discovered the right sort of treatment and “got to the bottom” of my problems.  After therapy and a momentous breakdown, things suddenly cleared.  I no longer had to live with the long-term, ongoing depressive symptoms. The “black dog” had disappeared for good. Of course, a certain amount of anxiety remained, but that seemed normal to me by this time.

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A Modern True Story was last modified: July 4th, 2021 by Anne Skyvington
October 3, 2012 0 comment
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About The Author

About The Author

Anne Skyvington

Anne Skyvington is a writer based in Sydney who has been practising and teaching creative writing skills for many years. You can learn here about structuring a short story and how to go about creating a longer work, such as a novel or a memoir. Subscribe to this blog and receive a monthly newsletter on creative writing topics and events.

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About The Author

About The Author

Anne Skyvington is a Sydney-based writer and blogger. <a href="https://www.anneskyvington.com.au She has self-published a novel, 'Karrana' and is currently writing a creative memoir based on her life and childhood with a spiritual/mystical dimension.

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