Genius and Mental Illness They say genius and insanity are just a hair apart. Throughout history there have been geniuses who exhibited some of this insanity. I will always remember that famous photo of Albert Einstein where he is sticking out his tongue. It was very strange to see him posing for a photo this way. He actually posed for more than one photo with his tongue out. Einstein said he would live with his wife only if she met certain conditions. The conditions were written down and entitled “Conditions” and here is what they were: A. You will make sure: 1. That my clothes and laundry are kept in good order 2. That I will receive my three meals regularly in my room 3. That my bedroom and study are kept neat and especially that my desk is left for my use only B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons… etc. Does this sound like a sane man? Even worse his wife agreed but, in the end, he left her anyway. Aristotle had said no great genius has existed without a strain of madness and he might have been right. Vincent van Gogh was truly a genius artist. His paintings which are worth a fortune today but were not worth much in his lifetime. Van Gogh cut off his ear and then painted himself with a bandage over the spot and named the painting Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear. This certainly was not the act of a normal person. He tried to eat paint at times and drink turpentine. Today doctors look at his behavior and some think he had a bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, epilepsy, and even possible lead poisoning. One day he became so depressed he shot himself in the chest and died the next day. Who could have been saner than the great emancipator Abraham Lincoln? It turns out most people. Lincoln had a secret and it was he suffered from severe depression. It was said to be so bad he might have eventually committed suicide if he wasn’t assassinated. It was suspected he was the author of a poem which was published in 1838 named The Suicide’s Soliloquy. One can only imagine how the pressures of the job of president would affect someone with these problems. Did you ever wonder why Edgar Allan Poe wrote such dark work? Maybe you suspected there was a reason and that reason might have been he was mentally ill and had dark thoughts. Some have said all the drink and drugs he took caused him to act this way but the fact is many people who are seriously mentally ill take drugs and drink heavily, so it may have been the other way around. It is said he had suicidal thoughts and this is where many of his stories and poems welled up from. He had written letters telling of his thoughts and his constant battle against them. One thing we will probably never know is what killed him. Adam Smith is one of the most famous economists of all time and is famous for his work “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”. When Smith was a student at Oxford he started to have fits. All during his life he talked to himself and complained about imaginary diseases. One of the things he was fond of doing was walking a great distance in only a nightgown. There is no doubt the man was a genius, but also suffered from mental illness. Charles Darwin became the poster boy for the evolution movement. To this day it is hard for scientists to go against his theories because of ridicule. Darwin had agoraphobia and panic disorder. He had become detached from reality. He also suffered from many physical problems thought to have been brought on because of his mental disorder. Darwin returned from the trip he took on the Beagle, his ship a few years later his mental illness took over and incapacitated him much of the time. There is a famous painting named The Scream. It was painted by Edvard Munch. Munch was a Norwegian artist. It depicts a tortured face screaming. It just so happens the artist of this masterpiece had a mental illness and this illness inspired the painting. The artist said “The sun began to set – suddenly the sky turned blood red; I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an endless scream passing through nature.” The artist had hallucinations and anxiety his entire life. His painting is now one of the most famous in the world. Why do so many geniuses have mental illness? Some say genius and mental illness are both caused by the same gene. Researchers have been studying the link between genius and insanity for hundreds of years and yet we don’t have a definitive answer. Some of the mental illnesses connected with genius are: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, and anxiety disorder. It is believed by many mental illness can help in creativity but doesn’t necessarily have to be present. Just because someone is a genius does not mean they have a mental illness, but quite a few geniuses do.
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