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crazyeddieme:thetomatowriter:hirakumblr:dubiousculturalartifact:hollowedskin:merindab:huffingtonpost:This Comedian Nails Why The Mental Illness + Creativity Connection is RidiculousI used to really worry that medications would harm my creativity and it’s part of why I resisted taking them. It hasn’t. If anything it’s allowed me to be more focused and able to complete things. My imagination hasn’t changed just because I’m on anti-depressants.a lot of my family didnt want me to start medications because they thought it would impact my ability to create, and I believed them.Now im getting better and better with my art because i dont have to fight through the brainfog or the constant panic attacks and can dedicate my energy to my work.Antidepressents didnt take my emotions away, they made them easier to handle.also Van Gogh was literally in an asylum receiving mental health treatment when he painted ‘Starry Night’. It was one of the most stable & productive periods of his life, despite the fact that wasn’t hugely effective treatment, because they didn’t really have modern understandings of what things work on mental illness. Like, you know. Medication.This is why we don’t romanticize mental illness or chronic disease.ALSO because I am reading a book of his letters right now, Van Gogh himself addressed the idea that the best art came from pain and said that his art tended to suffer when his depression was hitting pretty hard. So don’t even pull that shit where you give his untreated depression credit for his art. Van Gogh would have hated that, and if antidepressants/better treatment of mental illness HAD existed then we might have even more of his work now.I actually saw a review of one of Sylvia Plath’s works that went like:if she’d been medicated, maybe she wouldn’t have committed suicide, but on the other hand she might not have created such awesome poetry and stuffAnd… first of all that’s not how antidepressants work. It doesn’t shut down your brain and turn you into a shell of your former self. Depression sure as hell does that, though.I mean, if you read The Bell Jar, she tells the world that her actual unmedicated brain dropped her into a state of “I can’t do mental work anymore and I have no fucking idea why.” How anyone could get “her mental issues were the source of her amazing genius” out of that is just baffling.And second of all, she committed suicide at 30 fucking years old, which did a lot more to stop her literary output than any amount of good mental health could ever do.And third of all, she doesn’t owe the world any poetry at all if it means her head ends up in a god damn oven. -- source link
#mental illness#sylvia plath#suicide#medication