The Aughts

Felix Post, an English emeritus psychiatrist who performed a close study of the biographies of the most eminent men of our century in the arts, science and in politics noting, as have other authors, a higher prevalence of mood disorders in his sample, supposed that the psychological discomfort itself which accompanies to a mental disorder is the main drive for creative effort: many writers, in fact, asserted that through the act of writing they hold off depressive anguish. For him this relationship can be biuniform, meaning that even creative effort, like other types of stress, could favour a psychological breakdown: the intense intellectual work of the creative process is associated with higher neural activity in the brain, and this hyperactivity can determine the onset of mental problems in those already vulnerable. Even in the past, during the Renaissance, there were philosophers who supposed that intellectual work could lead to melancholy, and this was the explanation they offered for the proneness to depression in poets and other men of letters.*

*From The Gift of Saturn: Creativity and Psychopathology