Was It a Symptom of Mental Illness or Nourishment For His Creativity?
Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Today, let’s see if we can tie together some of the loose threads of my last post, which chronicled Joni Mitchell’s experience of depression. There we found that she explicitly rejected the idea that her experience indicated that she was mentally ill. Instead, she came to believe that, “Most of my best work came out of it. If you get rid of the…
Was It a Symptom of Mental Illness or Nourishment For Her Creativity?
Welcome to From Insults to Respect. From time to time I have been discussing two distinct ways of looking at the nature of depression–the medical model and what we may wish to refer to as the creative temperament view. The medical model views people who experience depression as having an illness that requires, as the first line of treatment, taking pills that are called “antidepressants.” The enormously…
Millions of people experience one or more episodes of depression during their lifetime. At such times, many fear that if news of this were to get out it would diminish the level of respect people have for them. Attempting to avoid the stigma of being viewed as having a mental illness, they shy away from revealing what they are experiencing. Some promote the idea that…
