hypomania and creativity

Post Reply New Topic

I'm not really bipolar - I'm dx'd with major depressive disorder becauseI don't have full blown manic episodes, nor do I have hypomanic episodes frequent enough (once a year or less) to qualify as bipolar. But I have some pretty wild creative frenzies when I do go hypomanic. Unfortuantely, it's great only for the first 3 days or so, and then it starts getting overhwleming. I have trouble sleeping, eating, dealing with the rest of normal life, and the ideas start coming too fast for me to do anything with except maybe make lists, outlines, brief notes. Then when it's over, I get really depressed, and the depression will last 2-3 times longer than the hypomania.

I think my hypomania is triggered by my depression - it's like my depression strifles my creativity to the point it explodes and turned into hypomania every once in a while. I find that the more I manage my depression, more free I am to be creative on a more consistant, disciplined basis, and this seems to keep the hypomanic episodes more infrequent. I also think my creative outlet is better. Even though I feel like GOD and every idea I come up is AWESOME when I am hypomanic (if you've ever been manic or hypomanic, you know what I mean), I tend to feel very ambivalent and unsure of my creative ideas that I produce during these episodes afterwards. It's harder for me to be objective, and often times the following depression really distorts things, so even if something's actually good, I may abandon it out despair and disilusionment I feel over it after the hypomania's abated.

I can honestly live without these episodes, even though I'm glad to have experienced them in the past. I guess I'm writing aboutthis to help me work out the last one I had, which was in July. Itlasted almost 3 weeks and it left me feeling somehwat disjointed and discombobulated about some projects I've been working on andothers I started while I was hypomanic. The depression's more or less abated now, but I'm still having a hard time picking up where I left off on some things. It's very annoying, especially on a Sunday evening like this one, when I have all this time I could be doing these projects, yet I can't get myself to focus on them long enough to get anything done. The fact I'm having a lot of personal problems right now isn't helping, but I know if I can get back to working on my creative projects, I'll feel better about other stuff in my life. Don't know if anyone can relate to this, but hey, there it is.

I love being a creative person, but I hate being a screwed up one.

I, for one, can definitely relate! I have just come down from a two week period of hypo mania. I got lots done on my project, and was really enjoying the "high." Now, while not depressed, the hpo mania exacerbated some physical symptoms, and I now feel really lousy. I, too, have questioned the worth of work produced while in an episode. And yet I can't help but feel that my creativity and mania are inextricably entwined, which is why I no longer seek medical intervention. When I accepted treatment for this, in the past, the creative wells dried up for at least five years. Not a scrap of work could I produce. Now, I have learned to let it get to a certain point, and then tone it down with natural herbs. Admittedly, when it gets to where I cannot sleep, and the ideas are rushing by too fast to catch, its not fun.

I love your sig! I should have that posted on the wall over my computer table, where I do most of my writing. Much of my writing has a similar motivation, and I definitely feel like an exile in this world. In fact, that gives me an idea...

Anyhow - LOL - ther's a lot of "big" lofty discussions about hypomania and its links, benefits and hinderence to creativity I try not to get into it. It gets kind of depressing for me...honestly, it just makes me realize how much in common I have with people like Virginia Wolf and Van Gogh, in terms of mental instablity, and that's not a happy thought. At least I live in a day in age that we known a little more about mental illness and such.

What distresses me is that I cannot see my creative gifts as being a "subsection" of y mental illness. Sometimes I feel that the discussion over the creativity-mental illness connection goes that way - that you have to be mad to be truly great creative-wise. I disagree both on personal grounds (I just refuse that I have to be crazy, unstable and miserible to be a good writer) and intellectual ones too. It's actually pretty irrational to think this is the only way human minds can be creative on a grander scale. I think perhaps, for me and others, these episodes of near insanity may help overcome inhibitions, habits or biases that stifle creativity otherwise, but that doesn't mean insanity is the only way one can overcome such obstacles, yes?

I understand what you mean about medical intervention. When Iwas getting treated for depression, I felt the meds and the therapy was serious hindering my creativity. It was a huge factor in my discontiuing that treatment after a couple of years. That and it really didn't helped me overcome depression - only made living with it bearable to a small degree. I'm honestly not interested in being a "tortured artist" and I definitely think that I am just as much a creative person without the depression (and occasional hypomanic episode).

In the past few years, my own "idiotherapy" - exercise, diet/fasting, supplements - has helped me not just manage my depression but have times where i'm actually free of it (what a concept!) and I've found that I can be very creative during those times. Not as manicky and intense as when I'm hypomanic, sure, but there's still a "high" I get off of it (and no awful depression afterwards). Moreover, I can be more rational and objective, my work's overall more consistant, and I don't get as readily discouraged when I have to revise or edit things. I also find that when my depression's genuinely alleviated, I don't have that hollow aching for inspiration I do when I am depressed, and that inspiration is easy to find and sustain. That make me feel a lot more confident and in control on my creativity. I really like that, much more so that the crazies.

One of the things that upset me about that last hypomanic episode was that I had started thinking I was out of the woods with my depression, but apparently I'm not completely. I was feeling pretty lousy about that last night when I was writing that first post last night. This morning I feel a little better and more optimistic abut the stuff I wrote during that last hypo episode. It's just hard going from that hypo "God" buzz, where everything flows fastand withut effort (seemingly) to a more level, mundane place where you have be more disciplined and focused.

My depression is too severe to be creative when it's bad. If it's mild and I can work through it, that's fine. It does help sometimes to be disinterested in other things, sot o focus on one thing, but if my depression's severe I'm disinterested in everything, even things I want to do. Depression just numbs me - at its worst, it's very much like being in a very dark, deep pit where I can sense there's opening above me and that there's a world going on up there, but I can't get out or even see the opening to the rest of the world.

Depression has nearly killed me, and it's certainly made my life far more difficult than it should have been. There's a lot of things - friends, opportunities, a career working with my real gifts, time, my youth - I've lost to depression. Now I'm 36, and frankly I'm sick of this. I was sick of it 7 years ago, when I got medical intervention to help me. I maded a promise to myself then that if my depression wasn't better by teh time I was 36, I'd kill myself and not force myself to live on and on in that hell. Thankfully, the pst two years have been significantly better for me, so I felt no need to go through witht hat promise. LOL. Morbid I know, but you do what you must to get through crap like this.

I think too many people, even researchers, academics and psychologists who suppsoedly have more "sound" prespectives, romanctize depression and mental illness in its relation to creativity. I think a lot of it is those people trying to account for the gap between themselves and someone else who does something extraordinary with their lives. And making that link to mental illness is too easy and too superficial. It allows these people to think "Well, of course I'm not that creative, but at least I'm sane!" That rationalization really pisses me off, espeically since the people most likely to think that are probably in denial about some neurosis or disorder they themselves have!

For me, I think in order to be true to my own creative self, I cannot allow myself to buy into other people's rationalizations and biases. If they need to "explain" why someone like me is more creative and innovative than they are with phony, psuedo-erudite nonsense to make themselves feel better, whatever... I mean, whatever happened to just being "talented"??? It's like we live in world that's obsessed with everyone being just "OK" that things like being artistic become indictative of having something wrong with you. God, Foucault would have a field day with this crap.

But thankfully, I don't have to listen to them. I have to do what's right for me. I suspect that there is link between creativity and mental illness, but it's much deeper and fundamental - more "basic" to our nature - than what many of explanations suggest. I think it's something that serves a dual root for either/or, like a neurological difference, unlike AS, has the potential, given other factors, to bear different fruit. some good like creativity and other less good like a predisposition towards certain mental illnesses.

There was a time I didn't think I could be creative with being unstable and essentially I was fated to having my life fall apart whenever I tried to devote more of myself to being creative. That was 7 years go, when my depression was so bad, I was more or less psychotic, seeing dead people in my bedroom and other insane crap. I was genuinely afaid that being creative meant being crazy, that the one thing that made life worth living was the something that made my life hell, and there was nothing I could do about it. That was why I was in some much despair I promised if I couldn't find a way to make life better for myself, I'd just end it. I think had I not be able to make great strid in overcoming my depresion int he years since, I'd probably still think that. I'm glad I can see things in a more broader prespective now, that I've experienceed being creative while not be deepressed ro crazy. That experience is what really has made me realize that I am, by nature, a creative person, but it's not my nature ot be depressed - that's is, rightfully, just an illness. There may be common denominator for both, but I no longer think I have to be both.

Anyhow, I've rambled on enugh about this. LOL.

I think that you have arrived at a good place, mentally, to be able to see all that you've mentioned. It is true that the mental profession has tried to link these things together, the better to have fun gazing at us under a microscope. But madness certainly doesn't equate creativity, or vice versa.