Depression in the Arts

Grumpy Old Bookman draws my atten­tion to some research into depres­sion in those who make their liv­ing (or try to) from the arts.

May I draw your atten­tion, yet again, to the research pub­lished by Kay Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her study showed that 38% of a group of emin­ent British writers and artists had been treated for a mood dis­order of one kind or another; of these, 75% had had anti­de­press­ants or lith­ium pre­scribed, or had been hos­pit­al­ised. Of play­wrights, 63% had been treated for depres­sion. These pro­por­tions are, as you will have guessed, are many times higher than in the pop­u­la­tion at large. 

Well, I’m not startled by this because I can’t think of another pro­fes­sion that applies pres­sures more con­du­cive to depres­sion than the arts, and writ­ing fic­tion in particular.

I teach psy­cho­lo­gical research meth­ods to post­gradu­ate stu­dents, and I have a PhD in exper­i­mental psy­cho­logy, so you might think I have some form of expert­ise. And the answer is ‘yes’, I do have some form of expert­ise, but, alas, it is unre­lated to clin­ical psy­cho­logy. It is much more related to four years study­ing the word ‘that’. However, ‘that’ won’t stop me (Oh, God, kill me know) observing that the job of writ­ing some­what pre­dis­poses us towards depression

The writer works alone and for long peri­ods. Social isol­a­tion is linked to depres­sion because social inter­ac­tion provides vari­ous kinds of sup­port that can inhibit depress­ive thoughts and tend­en­cies. The writer doesn’t get much exer­cise. Regular exer­cise mit­ig­ates against the devel­op­ment of depress­ive symp­toms. The writer is poorly paid, and this might lead to poor diet (though I must say that, in my case, the reduc­tion in shop­ping budget has led to health­ier meals), which is linked to depres­sion. Poor pay is also linked to lowered social status, another causal factor in depres­sion. Finally, your suc­cess as a writer is almost com­pletely attrib­ut­able to other people — edit­ors, pub­lish­ers, read­ers — and when those people aren’t help­ful (i.e. you almost never find your­self in court defend­ing a point­less action that will only drive up sales of your already mon­strous book), this might lead to a sense of hope­less­ness, and a feel­ing that the fun­da­ment­als of life are not under your control.

A psy­cho­lo­gist called Julian Rotter developed the idea of ‘locus of con­trol’. Essentially, it refers to the individual’s con­cep­tion of whether the import­ant things in life (rela­tion­ships, job, well-being, etc.) are determ­ined by the indi­vidual — an internal locus of con­trol — or determ­ined by external forces — an external locus of con­trol. This is prob­ably gets to the nub of the mat­ter. Artists are con­stantly exposed to approval from the word go, from pho­to­graph­ers to paint­ers to writers, and con­stantly at threat that the approval will be with­drawn (I would guess). Of course, artists are per­haps more sens­it­ive than the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion, too.

Am I depressed? No. But then, I’m an idiot. Only an idiot would want to write for money (the point Grumpy makes, not for the first time) when he should be tucked away in a uni­ver­sity some­where, research­ing his overedu­cated arse off.

It must be said that I’ve been some­what glib with my descrip­tion of depres­sion in this art­icle. If you sus­pect your­self, or someone you know, to be suf­fer­ing from depres­sion, you should seek pro­fes­sional med­ical advice. Here are some web­sites about depres­sion cata­logued by an organ­isa­tion for which I work.

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