The founder and CEO of deCode, a genetics company based in Reykjavik, Kari Stefansson made a statement during his interview with The Guardian. He explained the link between common biology for some mental disorders and its relation to creativity.
Many of the world's creative minds are often tagged insane by people who could not understand them. Great mind such as Frida Kahlo, Allan Poe, Vincent van Gogh are just a few.
As per the Collective Evolution, A clinical psychologist from John Hopkins University School of Medicine by the name of Key Redfield Jamison also suffered from a mental disorder. He then made a statement regarding the correlation of creativity and mental illness.
"The findings of some 20 or 30 scientific studies endorse the notion of the "tortured genius." Of the many varieties of psychosis, creativity appears to be most strongly linked to mood disorders, and especially bipolar disorder. For example, one study tested the intelligence of 700,000 Swedish 16-year olds and then followed up a decade later to learn which of them had developed mental illnesses. The startling results were published in 2010. They found that people who excelled when they were 16 years old were four times as likely to go on to develop bipolar disorder."
Stefansson then stated:
"To be creative, you have to think differently,and when we are different, we have a tendency to be labelled strange, crazy and even insane."
He then added:
"Often, when people are creating something new, they end up straddling between sanity and insanity, I think these results support the old concept of the mad genius. Creativity is a quality that has given us Mozart, Bach, Van Gogh. It's a quality that is very important for our society. But it comes at a risk to the individual, and 1% of the population pays the price for it. It means that a lot of the good things we get in life, through creativity, come at a price. It tells me that when it comes to our biology, we have to understand that everything is in some way good and in some way bad,"
"We of the craft are all crazy"- Lord Byron
