“They give unique insight into mental illness. These are very gifted people. They have very fine minds; they have thought about mental illness seriously. These are people who can write very intelligently. You can study case studies until they’re coming out of your ears, but if you read these poems you gain real insight into the human condition.”

Mental illness meets creativity in new journal of literary arts

By Laurie Davis
News Office

A MIND THAT POSSESSES GREAT ARTISTIC ability often suffers from great mental anguish, as well. This was a finding in a study of well-known visual and literary artists, and it was a result that Robert Lundin applied to contemporary artists who have lived with mental illness.

Lundin, Publications Manager for the University’s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation, was inspired by the research and subsequent book by Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins University. In her book, Touched with Fire, Manic-depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Jamison analyzed the mental suffering of such historic artists, composers, poets and authors as Vincent van Gogh, Robert Schumann, George Gordon, Lord Byron and Virginia Woolf.

Read the rest of it here:

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/020307/awakenings.shtml

"People with mental illnesses enrich our lives":

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