Patients with Bipolar Disorder More Creative; Creativity Associated with Worse Functional Connectivity of Brain Regions
While bipolar disorder can be a devastating illness, multiple studies indicate it is also associated with high levels of creativity. Researchers T. Su and Y. Kuan compared highly creative and normally creative patients with bipolar disorder to healthy controls with either normal or high creativity in the hopes of clarifying some characteristics of creativity in bipolar disorder. At the 2014 meeting of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, the researchers reported finding greater creativity in patients with bipolar disorder compared to normal controls, and that high creativity was associated with altered functional connectivity of two regions of the brain: the medial prefrontal cortex and the striatum.
The researchers hope to contribute to treatment solutions that can help patients with bipolar disorder reduce their emotional disturbance without losing their more positive cognitive functions like creativity.
Editor’s Note: Benson et al. found that compared to normal controls, bipolar patients had more positive hyperconnectivity of many brain regions using positron emission tomography (PET) scans with fludeoxyglucose to measure brain activity. Su and Kuan used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and found less connectivity of these two regions. How these differences relate to bipolar disorder and its links to creativity remain to be further studied.
Creative People More Likely to Have Mental Illness
Mozart
According to a large family study of people with severe mental disorders that was published by Kyaga et al. in the British Journal of Psychiatry last year, people with bipolar disorder and siblings of people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were much more likely to be working in creative professions than people without severe mental illness.
Kyaga talked to Medscape Medical News about the study:
“I think the study stresses the importance of treating all patients individually, and with the aim of finding the optimal treatment with regards to effectiveness, while minimizing the adverse effects that medication can have on positive aspects of psychiatric disorders,” Dr. Kyaga said.
“We often encounter the suggestion that lithium reduces creativity in patients with bipolar disorder and that adherence therefore is difficult. Now we can say that it is true that bipolar disorder is in fact associated with increased creativity, but we also know from previous research that terminating treatment with lithium in bipolar disorder will, in the long run, disrupt creative behavior,” he continued.
“We therefore need to pay close attention to what patients tell us while being treated, so that we can find a regimen that will work for them to prevent the disastrous consequences of severe psychiatric disorder, while providing them opportunities to uphold their creative behaviors in the long run,” Dr. Kyaga said.
