Certainly depression does. The tendency toward depression and manic depression seems to be common in creative people, but when they are in the grip of the beast itself, creativity seems to wither or die. For instance, the nineteenth-century composer Robert Schumann, a manic-depressive who made two failed suicide attempts and finally starved himself to death in an insane asylum at the age of 46, produced dozens of compositions yearly during his periods of hypomania—and little or nothing in the years of his darkest depressions. Many writers, musicians, and painters have complained to me that when they are depressed, they feel unable to write, to compose, to play their musical instrument, or to pick up their brushes to paint.
Prozac can alleviate this block by eliminating the depression and lifting the mood, thereby igniting the creative spark.
In some patients, Prozac brings the individual out of a depression into a revved-up, slightly hypomanic state. Patients claim that in that state they work fester and focus better. The creativity may be unchanged, but the productivity zooms. Consider -Vincent van Gogh. During periods he described as “furies of painting,” van Gogh stopped eating and sleeping for days at a time and was incredibly productive. In 1888, he painted two hundred canvases in two months. But although these manic highs were productive and creative, they were also dangerously unstable. Sometimes, he calmed down and had periods of lucidity and calm (a serenity reflected in the style of the paintings he made at these times); but lop often, the productive high led inexorably to psychotic periods of mania, paranoia, and violence. In addition to being repeatedly hospitalized, van Gogh attacked his friend Gauguin with a razor, cut off his own ear, threatened to shoot his friend Dr. Gachet, algid ultimately, at the age of 37, took his own life.
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