This post is not about writing about mental health, but about the mental health of the writers themselves. Our mental health is tied to our writing more than any other discipline in this world. It dictates how well or if we will write. It dictates the kinds of stories we want to tell. For example, my stories are very much about loss in one way or another. My most recent short film was about the loss of freedom as a reward for your crimes. My current novel is about the price to pay for ambition. Even when I didn’t know about topics as a teenager, my story still addressed them. One of my early novels was about being pushed into the position of a god almost against your will, and what you have to pay for it. I have not lost anyone close to me in life, but my mental health is not the best and the themes of my stories reflect it. I have always felt a sense of loss for things that I could not do in life for various personal reasons. So I try to capture that sense of loss in a thousand different ways. On the contrary, when I can’t be creative or can’t write well, I feel like a more depressed state takes over. There was a statistic somewhere that writers have a disproportionately high percentage of people suffering from mental illness. The most common is some form of depression. In fact I found this fascinating study on it:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2899997/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2899997/) It took place in India so some of the terms are a bit different and out of date and the sample size it is small (about 120 people) but it is valid and it is just one of many studies on this topic. He found a correlation between mental illness and the creativity of musicians and writers (remember that the correlation between children is not causality). It also found that creatives are more likely to have a family history of mental illness than the control group. And the most fascinating thing is that creative people also have other creative people in their family. Just a fascinating study overall. What do you think is most likely? Do people with mental illness, specifically mood disorders, find their way out through the stories they write? Or does having great creativity in itself cause mental illness? Either way it is fascinating. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts and experiences on mental health and writing.
This post is not about writing about mental health, but about the mental health of the writers themselves. Our mental health is tied to our writing more than any other discipline in this world. It dictates how well or if we will write. It dictates the kinds of stories we want to tell. For example, my stories are very much about loss in one way or another. My most recent short film was about the loss of freedom as a reward for your crimes. My current novel is about the price to pay for ambition. Even when I didn’t know about topics as a teenager, my story still addressed them. One of my early novels was about being pushed into the position of a god almost against your will, and what you have to pay for it. I have not lost anyone close to me in life, but my mental health is not the best and the themes of my stories reflect it. I have always felt a sense of loss for things that I could not do in life for various personal reasons. So I try to capture that sense of loss in a thousand different ways. On the contrary, when I can’t be creative or can’t write well, I feel like a more depressed state takes over. There was a statistic somewhere that writers have a disproportionately high percentage of people suffering from mental illness. The most common is some form of depression. In fact I found this fascinating study on it:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2899997/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2899997/) It took place in India so some of the terms are a bit different and out of date and the sample size it is small (about 120 people) but it is valid and it is just one of many studies on this topic. He found a correlation between mental illness and the creativity of musicians and writers (remember that the correlation between children is not causality). It also found that creatives are more likely to have a family history of mental illness than the control group. And the most fascinating thing is that creative people also have other creative people in their family. Just a fascinating study overall. What do you think is most likely? Do people with mental illness, specifically mood disorders, find their way out through the stories they write? Or does having great creativity in itself cause mental illness? Either way it is fascinating. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts and experiences on mental health and writing.
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