Modern American poets John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz and Anne Sexton were all hospitalized for bipolar disorder during their lives. And many painters and composers, among them Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Mingus and Robert Schumann were similarly afflicted.
The belief that “madness” is related to creativity is not limited to artistic creativity. Consider for example the movie, “A Beautiful Mind”, which tells the story of Nobel Laureate in economics, John Nash, who suffered from Schizophrenia.
