Is there an inverted-U relationship between creativity and psychopathology?

Few issues polarize the scientific community within the field of creativity as the purported association between creativity and psychopathology. The idea that the two are intimately linked dates back to Greek antiquity where the mental state of creative individuals during idea generation was noted to be highly aberrant. However, such eccentric states were not held to reflect clinical levels of mental illness until the 1800s (Becker, 2001). The intuitive appeal of this connection partly stems from the commonalities we associate with mental illness and creativity, including a high tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to generate non-generic conceptual connections, and the adoption of alternative perspectives (Abraham, in press). Moreover, higher than average incidences of mental illness are found among people who practice professions that demand high levels of creativity, such as visual artists and writers (Kyaga et al., 2011; Simonton, 2014). The information processing mechanism that is generally proposed as underlying the link between creativity and psychopathology is that shortcomings during normative cognition (e.g., cognitive disinhibition), that are characteristic of certain psychiatric populations (e.g., psychosis), may translate to benefits in the context of creative cognition (Carson, 2011). There are, however, also good grounds to be skeptical of the “mad genius” meme, which some argue is a quixotic notion at best (Schlesinger, 2009). For one thing, many of the studies that have been used to support this idea have come under a lot of criticism on methodological counts (Thys et al., 2014). Some have even shown that the presence of psychopathological traits explains only a paltry amount of the variance in creative performance (Silvia and Kimbrel, 2010). In addition, notwithstanding notable exceptions (e.g., van Gogh), individuals who achieved creative eminence in their fields were not operating at peak levels of productivity when they reached the point of severe mental illness. So how can we make sense of this picture given that the evidence of a positive relationship between creativity and mental illness is clearly mixed? One approach would be to breakdown the empirical investigations that have assessed this link into meaningful categories based on a specific criterion and to evaluate whether any systematic patterns emerge as a result. The madness-creativity link has, for instance, been investigated by assessing the performance of both psychiatric populations as well as subclinical populations on measures of creativity (Kaufman, 2014). The most well studied psychiatric populations in this regard include individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism. Subclinical populations have also been widely assessed, and these refer to high risk healthy populations who are defined as such because they exhibit a high degree of mental illnessrelevant personality traits. The rationale behind investigating subclinical groups is that studying high-functioning individuals who show some degree of predisposition for a clinical disorder enables us to understand the workings of the information processing biases related to that disorder without the burden of having to control for variables that can exert a confounding effect in studies on clinical populations (e.g., medication). Indeed, much evidence points to similarities in the information processing biases (e.g., latent disinhibition) typical of specific clinical groups (e.g., schizophrenia) and their respective subclinical populations (e.g., high psychoticism or schizotypal groups). One means by which the creativitypsychopathology link can be investigated then is to focus on investigations of populations that are documented to have similar information processing biases and to cluster these studies by the type of population (clinical/subclinical) and the severity of disorder (high/low dysfunction). Let’s take the premise that reduced top-down down control (influence of knowledge and expectations) on information processing can have a facilitative or debilitative effect on creative cognition. A number of psychiatric populations, such as ADHD and schizophrenia, are associated with poor top-down control and corresponding fronto-striatal dysfunction (Bradshaw and Sheppard, 2000),