Geniuses and Mental illnesses.

I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are. The notion that genius is only thinly separated from insanity goes back at least to ancient Greece. Aristotle linked the two when he said, “There is no great genius without a touch of madness.”*

Many of history's most celebrated creative geniuses were mentally ill, from renowned artists Vincent van Gogh and Frida Kahlo to literary giants Virginia Woolf and Edgar Allan Poe.

Current findings of some 20 or 30 scientific studies endorse the notion of the "tortured genius." Of the many varieties of psychosis, creativity appears to be most strongly linked to mood disorders, and especially bipolar disorder.

"People with bipolar tend to be creative when they're coming out of deep depression. "

"When a bipolar patient's mood improves, his brain activity shifts, too: activity dies down in the lower part of a brain region called the frontal lobe, and flares up in a higher part of that lobe. Amazingly, the very same shift happens when people have bouts of creativity. "