VERBAL CREATIVITY, DEPRESSION AND ALCOHOLISM - AN INVESTIGATION OF 100 AMERICAN AND BRITISH WRITERS

Background. An earlier study of 291 world famous men had shown that on ly visual artists and creative writers were characterised, in comparis on with the general population, by a much higher prevalence of patholo gical personality traits and alcoholism. Depressive disorders, but not any other psychiatric conditions, had afflicted writers almost twice as often as men with other high creative achievements. The present inv estigation was undertaken to confirm these findings in a larger and mo re comprehensive series of writers, and to discover causal factors for confirmed high prevalences of affective conditions and alcoholism in writers. Method. Data were collected from post-mortem biographies and, where applicable, translated into DSM diagnoses. The frequencies of v arious abnormalities and deviations were compared between poets, prose fiction writers, and playwrights. Results. A high prevalence in write rs of affective conditions and of alcoholism was confirmed. That of bi polar affective psychoses exceeded population norms in poets, who in s pite of this had a lower prevalence of all kinds of affective disorder s, of alcoholism, of personality deviations, and related to this, of p sychosexual and marital problems, than prose fiction and play writers. Conclusions. A hypothesis is developed, which links the greater frequ ency of affective illnesses and alcoholism in playwrights and prose wr iters, in comparison with poets, to differences in the nature and inte nsity of their emotional imagination. This hypothesis could be tested by clinical psychologists collaborating with experts in literature on random samples of different kinds of writers.