In the echo of many artists' minds, where creation teeters between collapse and revelation, a spectre lingers. That deep-seated shapeshifter. The eternal figure of the tortured genius. Tempting, threatening, evolving...

As a neurodivergent artist myself, I can't help getting caught up in the myth. Or is it the fact of the matter? 

To frame the tortured artist as a myth is to trivialize its historical function. Calling it a fact betrays its complexity. And besides, there's always mix of both. Wherever you look. Just like every other binary you care to name.

Madness and genius have always been muddled together on a spectrum. Charted across the XY axes of innovation and creativity.

From Plato’s ecstatic seizure to Kusama’s self-curated hallucinations, the link between madness and artistic brilliance has never belonged to biology or metaphor alone. It belongs to society’s need to explain what doesn’t conform. Pathologizing prophecy, sanctifying breakdown, canonizing pain, exalting transcendence and tickling unspoken desire.

One thing's for sure: the figure of the tortured artist keeps evolving. Swaddled in Dürer’s melancholia, seduced by Rimbaud’s derangement, institutionalized under Nazi taxonomy, and resurrected in the vocabulary of neurodiversity. Rhyming through history like a ghost in new masks.

This article doesn't argue a case so much as it listens for the logic of persistence and poetry. Tracing each era’s attempt to trap genius in the vocabulary of illness. A genealogy of vision and catharsis.

Key Takeaways

• Antiquity’s dilemma: mania as muse, melancholy as curse: The Greeks both feared and venerated madness, framing poetic insight as divine seizure while tethering melancholia to heroic isolation. Their legacy split inspiration into ecstasy and pathology. A double lineage inherited by all later theories of artistic abnormality.
• Saturnine genius and renaissance self-fashioning: Marsilio Ficino’s metaphysical melancholy recast psychic pain as celestial heritage. In Dürer’s brooding angel, the Renaissance found a secular saint: one who thinks so deeply she cannot move. A frozen genius caught between calculation and abyss.
• Romantic suffering as proof of authenticity: By the 19th century, anguish became a credential. Van Gogh’s asylum became his atelier. Rimbaud made psychosis into praxis. The tormented genius was no longer pitied; he was worshipped. His illness reframed as evidence of artistic integrity.
• Modernism’s collision course: psychiatry meets avant-garde: Where psychiatrists quantified symptoms, the avant-garde cultivated them. Dubuffet’s art brut and the Nazis’ Entartete Kunst exhibition clashed violently over who could define madness. And whose vision counted as art. Here, stigma was both weapon and aesthetic.
• Neurodivergence, identity, and the end of the myth? Today, artists reclaim their own minds. Refusing old binaries. Kusama paints her phantoms into dot-infinity. Brian Wilson scores sanity out of disarray. The mad genius no longer haunts the attic. She curates her gallery. Madness becomes medium, not mark.

Classical Antiquity: Divine Madness and Melancholy

Before lithium dulled the roar, before neuroimaging sliced the mind into scan and symptom, there was only the sky and the voices it delivered. Plato, listening to that sky, named its thunder μανία—divine madness. Not a malfunction. A possession.

In Phaedrus, Socrates warns that the poet who writes without madness, without the rapture of the Muse, will be outstripped by one who has been seized. Not taught. Taken. Inspiration, then, was abduction by the sacred.

This was not embellishment. It was ontology. Truth was not accessed through discipline, but through rupture. The soul must be cracked to receive what reason cannot hold. Divine madness was more than exaltation. It was epistemic privilege.

The frenzied prophet, the inspired poet, the ecstatic lover—all became thresholds through which knowledge erupted. The Greek psyche, balanced precariously between logos and mythos, elevated irrationality as a form of higher logic.

The Black Bile Question

But the ancients were not fools for frenzy alone. In Aristotle’s Problemata, a darker speculation takes shape: Why are the greatest minds so often melancholic? Here, madness ceases to be seizure by Muse and becomes pathology of temperament. Melancholia—black bile—swells in the Hippocratic body, curdles thought, stirs genius. Philosophy, poetry, statecraft—all trail its stain. The mind as haunted organ, its brilliance shadowed by abyss.

Aristotle did not metaphorize this link. He anatomized it. Melancholia was a force of nature, quantifiable in bile, evident in behavior. He observed not with awe but with chilling clarity: the minds that change the world are often those teetering at its edge. The melancholic did not need gods. He needed care, kindness, a willing ear and thoughtful consideration. But treatment would not come—not yet.

Still, these opposing frames—divine mania and biochemical sorrow—did not compete. They fused. The ancient artist stood at the intersection of vision and illness, sanctified and suspect. To be inspired was to risk incoherence. To be profound was to flirt with collapse.

The Roman Formula

Roman thought absorbed this tension and gave it permanence. Seneca, that Stoic sentinel of sorrow, engraved it into cultural steel: nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit. No great genius exists without a measure of madness. Not metaphor—measure. The axiom would become gospel for centuries of artists clawing their way through despair in pursuit of the sublime.

Meanwhile, early medicine strained to contain the divine within the mortal. Hippocrates severed madness from mysticism, classifying “sacred disease” as neurological fault rather than divine curse. Seizures were symptoms, not signs. Yet even he could not fully erase the aura of sacred delirium. The myth of the mad genius, once ignited, proved unquenchable.

Cassandra’s Curse and Renaissance Revival

Avatars for the mad genius multiplied. Cassandra, cursed with foresight no one believed, became the paradigm of the tragic visionary. Her clarity was indistinguishable from delusion. The more truth she spoke, the more insane she appeared. She was not misunderstood by accident. She was rendered mad because she saw too much.

Fast forward to the Renaissance, ever hungry for antique fire, and we find they seized these figures then transfigured them into a Neoplatonic grandeur. Philosophers, led by Marsilio Ficino, revived the melancholic temperament not as a humoral deficiency but a celestial signature. Ficino, himself prone to Saturnine fits, recast melancholy as a divine inheritance. Its shadow the condition for intellectual and spiritual illumination.

This reframing reached its most iconic expression not in prose but in image. In 1514, the German master Albrecht Dürer engraved Melencolia I, an etching of a winged, brooding figure hemmed in by symbols of the arts and sciences—compass, hourglass, balance, bell. She sits idle amid tools, as if paralyzed by her own overactive mind. The engraving is often read as Dürer’s psychological self-portrait, capturing the existential paralysis of a genius capable of infinite thought but frozen by his own insight. Here, intellect becomes a form of suffering, brilliance a form of entrapment.

Dürer’s angel of gloom became the visual cipher for Ficino’s theology of the melancholic: contemplative, Saturn-ruled, crowned with insight but burdened by inertia. This was no longer divine madness in the Platonic sense. It was psychological stasis spiritualized into genius. The Renaissance had taken the Greek fire and forged it into symbol.

To be touched by the gods—or by Saturn—was to be removed from the ordinary. Elevated or exiled. Both, often. The line between brilliance and breakdown was not dotted. It was ritualized. The ancients did not ask whether madness caused genius or genius conjured madness. They assumed the two were twins—twisting, torquing, echoing each other across generations. The question was never if they were linked. Only how much the world could bear of the link before it broke.

Romantic Era: The Rise of the Tormented Genius

By the time the Enlightenment’s rational flame began to sputter against the winds of revolution and industrial soot, a new archetype clawed its way out of the shadows: the artist as martyr, prophet, and lunatic. The Romantics didn’t merely inherit the classical paradox of madness and genius—they set it ablaze. No longer was the divine muse a visitor. She was a resident, and she had no mercy. Affliction was no longer accident. It was aesthetic.

Romanticism demanded wounds. It sculpted identity from suffering. Madness, once feared or revered, became proof. The more tormented the soul, the more truthful the art. In Goethe’s Werther, love leads to suicide. In Byron’s Manfred, knowledge is indistinguishable from agony. In each, a genius stripped of illusions staggers toward death or damnation, haloed in sorrow.

This was no tragic misfortune. It was manifesto.

Artists and writers of the Romantic age began to perform their unraveling. They dressed in melancholic regalia—black coats, erratic lives, opiated dreams. Blake saw angels in trees. Coleridge wrote between gulps of laudanum. Shelley walked with ghosts. They were not embellishing their anguish. They were weaponizing it. To suffer was to be authentic. To break down was to break through.

Derangement as Doctrine

And then came Rimbaud, a teenager detonating every poetic form with derangement as methodology. In 1871, he announced that the poet must “make himself a visionary through a long, prodigious, and rational derangement of all the senses,” embracing “every form of love, of suffering, of madness” as fuel. The phrase was not poetic flourish. It was operational theory. Creativity required disintegration. Hallucination was initiation. This “reasoned derangement” credo reads like a manifesto for the avant-garde to come, rooted in Romantic sensibility but leaping toward surrealist rupture.

Nietzsche—later, darker—would distill the same principle with surgical clarity: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” The visionary and the deranged were not different species. They were gradients of the same combustive spectrum.

Here, the boundary between artistic pursuit and psychiatric episode began to melt. Visionaries were no longer conduits of the divine. They were pyres burning from within.

Pathology or Prophecy?

Medicine, still fumbling its way out of medieval restraints, began to take notice. The nascent field of psychiatry viewed this romantic disorder not as mysticism, but mutation. Enter Cesare Lombroso.

A criminologist obsessed with deviance, Lombroso’s 1891 text The Man of Genius argued that extraordinary creativity stemmed from a hereditary “constitutional defect”—a subtle form of epilepsy or insanity that might be latent in the genius or his family. Genius, in his account, was no divine spark. It was pathology. He catalogued asymmetrical skulls, nervous temperaments, addiction patterns. Creativity, he insisted, emerged not from virtue, but defect. The price of the sublime was paid in neurological misfires and inherited rot. Many forms of deviance—crime, madness, genius—were, for him, branches of the same tainted family tree.

Lombroso’s theory was part science, part eugenic fantasy. It drew on Social Darwinism to position genius as cousin to criminality and psychosis—a degenerate flourish masquerading as greatness.

Not everyone agreed. John Charles Bucknill, an English psychiatrist, responded with what came to be known as the “stud theory,” arguing that “genius is a higher development of sanity.” He saw it as the apex of mental evolution—a fine-tuned nervous system capable of elevated insight. But his rebuttal lacked poetry. Lombroso’s myth had already gripped the public. The idea of the mad genius was too seductive to let go.

As one mid-20th-century reviewer would wryly observe, “the genius becomes the victim of his chroniclers’ fantasy”—a fiction imposed from without, often in defiance of the facts. But it was a fiction the era was determined to believe.

Van Gogh’s Ledger of Collapse

And then came Van Gogh.

Here was the archetype rendered in flesh. A failed preacher turned painter turned patient. His agony was not performative. It was cellular. And it bled onto every canvas. When he sliced off his ear in Arles, it wasn’t scandal—it was sacrament. When he admitted himself to Saint-Rémy in 1889, it wasn’t retreat—it was revolution.

Within the asylum’s iron silence, Van Gogh exploded. He painted over 200 works in 18 months, each one vibrating with internal pressure. Skies corkscrewed into hysteria. Crows convulsed above haunted wheat. A doctor’s face stared back from the void of diagnosis itself. These weren’t hallucinations. They were cartographies of collapse.

And Van Gogh knew it. In a letter, he wrote: “the more I become decomposed, the more sick and fragmented I am, the more I become an artist.” This was not metaphor. It was ledger. He was documenting his own disintegration as a source of illumination.

He died in 1890 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He had sold one painting. He became, posthumously, the sacred template: genius as self-immolating proof. As Antonin Artaud wrote decades later, Van Gogh was “suicided by society”—not driven mad by illness alone, but by a culture that could not make room for his vision.

By the turn of the century, the image of the tortured artist was no longer an anomaly. It was institution. Culture didn’t just tolerate the mad genius. It required him. Madness became credential, and suffering became the currency of artistic legitimacy.

The Romantics did not ask whether madness hindered or helped genius. They collapsed the two. To be broken was to be true. To be true was to be great. It was the cruelest theology art had ever written.

Modernism: Psychiatry, “Degenerate Art,” and the Avant-Garde

As the twentieth century uncoiled in sirens and dust, the dialogue between madness and genius cracked into a confrontation. Modernism was not interested in reconciliation. It preferred rupture. Where Romanticism had spiritualized breakdown, modernity sought to dissect it—on stretchers, on canvases, in clinics, in manifestos. This was the century where genius became both subject and specimen. Where the asylum became not just confinement, but metaphor. And where the line between patient and prophet was no longer blurred—it was contested.

Psychiatry, bolstered by diagnostic ambition, began its taxonomic ascent. In the early 20th century, the codification of major psychiatric diagnoses accelerated. Emil Kraepelin named dementia praecox—a classification that Eugen Bleuler would later reconceptualize and rechristen as schizophrenia, distinguishing it from mood disorders like manic-depressive psychosis (later bipolar disorder). Madness was no longer divine or melancholic—it was a problem of category. Its etiology was biological. Its treatment, institutional.

But the avant-garde had other ideas.

Prinzhorn’s Bombshell and the Rise of Art Brut

Surrealism emerged not as a style, but a schism. Born in the cataclysmic trenches of World War I and suckled on Freud’s dreamwork, the Surrealists did not flee madness—they chased it. André Breton, a psychiatrist by training, declared logic bankrupt. Reason was the prison; the unconscious, the revolt. Automatic writing, dream analysis, and psychic automatism weren’t art techniques—they were insurgencies.

To Breton and his comrades, psychosis was not pathology—it was clairvoyance. Surrealists exalted schizophrenic vision, children’s drawings, spiritualist scribbles. Breton himself had worked in a neurological ward during the war. He saw in the asylum not disorder but disclosure.

In 1922, that vision found its scripture: Artistry of the Mentally Ill: A Contribution to the Psychology and Psychopathology of Configuration by Hans Prinzhorn. A landmark study with lavish illustrations of drawings and paintings by asylum patients, Prinzhorn’s book detonated like a grenade. It revealed a visual grammar of the deranged that rivaled anything in the salons. These were not depictions of madness. They were madness: executed in chalk, pencil, pigment, blood.

Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and other modernists were deeply influenced by these raw creations. For them, the asylum patient was not an object of study but a fellow traveler—a precursor. Jean Dubuffet would later call such work art brut—raw art, untouched by schooling, unsullied by bourgeois convention. To Dubuffet, these outsider artists were not broken. They were pure, unfiltered, anti-cultural. In 1951, he published Anticultural Positions, with Marcel Duchamp at his side, declaring war on refinement. The untrained mind, untouched by ideology or market, became the last sanctuary of originality.

But while the avant-garde elevated madness into method, fascism marched in.

Degeneration as Dogma: The Nazi Aesthetic Purge

In 1937, the Nazi regime mounted its most grotesque exhibition: Entartete Kunst—Degenerate Art. The curators did not merely attack the work of avant-garde artists. They juxtaposed paintings by Chagall, Klee, Kandinsky, and others with drawings by asylum patients, explicitly collapsing them into a single pathological category. One placard read: “Art which does not speak to our soul.”

The implication was totalitarian: abstraction = pathology = racial impurity. Modern artists, the mentally ill, and Jews were lumped together in a taxonomy of filth. This was not just aesthetic propaganda—it was eugenic dogma. The regime’s ideology of degeneration declared that those whose art deviated from Aryan norms must themselves be diseased. Their slogan—Lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life”—applied first to psychiatric patients.

They became the first to die under Aktion T4, the Nazi euthanasia program. Over 70,000 institutionalized individuals were killed in secrecy. Their art was not preserved. It was burned. The regime that branded madness as crime also criminalized genius as disease.

And yet, perversely, the violence only reinforced the link it tried to destroy. The phrase “crazy modern art” entered the vernacular. Nazi vilification of modernism cemented its association with disorder—an association the avant-garde wore as armor.

Laing, Barnes, and the Politics of Psychosis

In the ruins of war, psychiatry rearmed. It turned to electroshock, thorazine, and the growing lexicon of DSM diagnostics. But resistance emerged again—this time from within. In the 1960s, R.D. Laing exploded psychiatric orthodoxy. Drawing from existential philosophy and his own clinical experience, Laing inverted the psychiatric gaze.

What if schizophrenia was not illness, but adaptation? A sane response to an insane environment?

“For Laing,” writes historian Sander Gilman, *“it is the family (or perhaps even society) which is destructively mad; those whom society labels as mad are only reflecting the craziness by which they find themselves surrounded.”* Madness, in this framework, was not dysfunction but dislocation—a last defense against a pathological world.

To test this theory, Laing founded Kingsley Hall, a therapeutic community in East London. No white coats. No locked doors. Patients were encouraged to regress—to unravel and rebuild. At the heart of this crucible was Mary Barnes.

A former nurse, Barnes descended into psychosis. At Kingsley Hall, under the guidance of Joseph Berke, she began to paint. Berke handed her jars of pigment and said: show us your madness. She did—sometimes with fingers, sometimes with feces. The canvases were not therapeutic despite her illness—they were therapeutic through it. Art became architecture of self.

In 1969, Barnes held a one-woman exhibition in London. It was not rehabilitation. It was recognition. The line between patient and artist dissolved.

Outside the clinic, the art world caught up. Dubuffet’s art brut became institutionalized. Museums staged exhibits of schizophrenic and autistic artists as visionaries, not curiosities. The American Folk Art Museum championed creators like Adolf Wölfli and Martín Ramírez, whose intricate, obsessive works redefined the canon.

Yet even in celebration, appropriation lingered. As Hester Parr observed, the art of asylum patients historically signified their “not belonging” to society, even as it fascinated that society. The label “outsider” honored their work while perpetuating their marginalization. Inclusion often reaffirmed exclusion.

Still, a shift had begun. Madness was no longer diagnosis alone. It had become medium, archive, aesthetic, insurgency. The avant-garde and the clinical were no longer opposed. They were mirrors—each diagnosing the other.

Modernism’s greatest rupture was not formal. It was ethical. It asked: Who defines the boundaries of mind? And what happens when those boundaries become the frame of a masterpiece?

Postmodern Perspectives: Madness Reframed

As the twentieth century staggered toward its close and the digital ether began to pixelate reality itself, the mad genius did not vanish—it mutated. Diagnosis became identity. Disorder became discourse. Madness, once nailed to asylum walls, escaped into memoir, manifesto, metadata. If Modernism had asked who gets to define madness, Postmodernity asked whether such definitions could survive scrutiny at all.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now bloated into its fifth edition (DSM-5), enumerated conditions with near-liturgical gravity: schizoaffective disorder, hypergraphia, cyclothymia, neurodevelopmental disorders, and many others. Yet even as it catalogued, it fragmented. Identity scattered into spectrums, comorbidities, provisional codes. The mad were no longer just patients. They were narrators.

Amid this diagnostic sprawl, resistance cohered—not in clinics, but in communities. The Neurodiversity movement, which emerged in the 1990s and was initially anchored in autistic self-advocacy, unspooled into a broader epistemological insurgency. Its premise was ontological: neurologies differ. Pathology is not defect, but variation. Neurotypes are not deviations from a norm; the norm itself is a statistical fiction.

This framework did not deny suffering. It contextualized it. Where psychiatry pathologized distress, Neurodiversity activists and theorists asked: what if the pain stems not from the mind’s wiring, but from society’s intolerance, from its failure to support and accommodate cognitive variance?

Kusama, Wilson, Khakpour, Barnes: Art as Architectural Survival

Artists seized the reframe. No longer mythologized by others, the neurodivergent began scripting their own cartographies of mind. Their work was not about coping. It was authorship.

Yayoi Kusama, diagnosed and institutionalized for decades in a Tokyo psychiatric facility, transforms hallucination into cosmos. “My art originates from hallucinations only I can see,” she declares. Her polka dots, infinite mirror rooms, and soft phalluses are not symptoms rendered aesthetic—they are aesthetic as survival. “By translating the fear of hallucinations into paintings,” she says, “I have been trying to cure my disease.” Her cure is not compliance. It is transmutation.

Brian Wilson, architect of The Beach Boys’ harmonic architectures, has lived publicly with schizoaffective disorder. He speaks of music as both expression of and balm for this condition. His compositions echo with voices—some real, some spectral—but always orchestrated into luminous form. Music became, for him, structure against disarray.

Porochista Khakpour, in memoirs like Sick, writes creativity through the lens of chronic illness, depression, and long COVID. Her prose refuses the dichotomy of mind versus flesh, madness versus expression. She collapses diagnosis into style, illness into narrative form.

Mary Barnes, again, emerges not as anomaly but as archetype. Her crude, radiant figures are not artifacts of psychosis—they are milestones in a journey psychiatry could not chart. She painted not to recover, but to record.

In all these creators, madness is not metaphor. It generates method. The canvas is not therapy. It is architecture, autobiography, insurgency.

Recovery as Reinvention, Not Return

Clinically, treatment models evolved alongside this cultural shift. Art therapy—once a marginal adjunct—gained legitimacy. Community-based creative practices flourished. In 2005, Scotland appointed its first national Artist for Mental Health. Institutions began to reimagine recovery not as return to psychiatric normalcy, but as reclamation of narrative. Self-expression became essential not because it soothed—but because it restored personhood.

Art here was not just catharsis. It was agency.

Still, the trope of the mad genius lingered—its silhouette flickering across biopics, gallery placards, social media confessions. From Frida Kahlo’s corseted torso to Virginia Woolf’s weighted pockets, from Robin Williams’s levity to Sylvia Plath’s oven—the archive of creative suffering remains saturated. These stories resonate because they compress contradiction: beauty wrung from breakdown. Pain made public.

But the fetish is not neutral. It calcifies suffering into aesthetic. Romanticizing illness can deter care. It can turn cries into collectibles.

And yet, even neuroscience—our newest oracle—cannot sever the link.

Fetish and Fact: Creativity at the Edge of Reason

Psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison, in her landmark study Touched with Fire, surveyed dozens of eminent poets and painters, finding statistically significant correlations between creative achievement and mood disorders—particularly bipolarity.

A Norwegian epidemiological study involving over 21,000 highly educated individuals found that those in creative professions were more likely to have relatives with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder—suggesting a heritable, spectrum-based connection.

Neuroimaging studies further show shared neural circuitry between creative cognition and psychosis: dopaminergic spikes, hyperconnectivity in the default mode network, and thalamic filter loosening are common to both.

These findings converge in psychologist Dean Keith Simonton’s “mad genius paradox”: across populations, creative individuals tend to be mentally healthier than average—but at the highest levels of creative achievement, rates of pathology increase. Both skeptics and believers of the genius–madness link, he argues, are right in their own ways. Genius is not made by madness. But it flirts with its margins.

This nuance matters. It preserves complexity. It resists easy causality.

Naming the Archive: Mad Pride, Mad Studies, and Resistance

Today’s most radical gesture is neither to romanticize nor to cure, but to listen. What does the divergent mind disclose?

Activists in the Mad Pride movement, and academics in Mad Studies, extend this listening. They argue that madness, like gender or race, is socially constructed—regulated by institutional power. That psychiatry polices deviance as much as it treats distress. That society invents madness as mirror—projecting what it fears, what it refuses to name.

Antonin Artaud, poet and prophet of postwar psychosis, wrote: “A tainted society invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects.” Once dismissed as delirium, his thesis now animates syllabi across psychology, philosophy, and cultural studies.

The mad genius today is no longer exile. She is curator. She names her condition. She authors her archive. The attic is gone. There is no whispering. There is only the work.

The sociohistorical interplay of genius and madness is still unfolding—not toward closure, but toward a richer taxonomy of consciousness. What emerges is not a diagnosis, but an artform.

Reading List

1. Aristotle (attrib.). Problemata XXX.1, 953a10–14. In Aristotelis Opera, edited by I. Bekker. Berlin: Reimer, 1831.
2. Artaud, Antonin. Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society. Translated by Jean Paul Sartre. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1947.
3. Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.
4. Bucknill, John Charles. The Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1860.
5. Dubuffet, Jean. “Anticultural Positions.” In Jean Dubuffet: Writings on Art, edited by Eliza Wilkerson, 123–136. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992.
6. Ficino, Marsilio. Three Books on Life (De Vita Libri Tres). Translated by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989.
7. Gilman, Sander L. “The Mad Man as Artist: Medicine, History and Degenerate Art.” Journal of Contemporary History 20, no. 4 (1985): 575–597.
8. Green, Rachael. “What Does Social Darwinism Say About Mental Health?” Verywell Mind, April 17, 2023.
9. Hare, Edward H. “Creativity and Mental Illness.” British Medical Journal 295, no. 6613 (1987): 1587–1589.
10. Jamison, Kay Redfield. Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. New York: Free Press, 1993.
11. Kusama, Yayoi. Interview by Joe Brennan. Bomb Magazine, no. 71, Spring 2000.
12. Laing, R. D. The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon Books, 1967.
13. Lombroso, Cesare. The Man of Genius. Translated by H. R. Marshall. London: Walter Scott, 1891.
14. Parr, Hester. “Mental Health, the Arts and Belongings.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31, no. 2 (2006): 150–166.
15. Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by R. Hackforth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952.
16. Prinzhorn, Hans. Artistry of the Mentally Ill: A Contribution to the Psychology and Psychopathology of Configuration. Translated by Eric von Brockdorff. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1972.
17. Seneca the Younger. De Tranquillitate Animi. In Seneca: Dialogues and Essays, translated by John Davie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
18. Simonton, Dean Keith. “The ‘Mad-Genius Paradox’: Can Creative People Be More Mentally Healthy but Highly Creative People More Mentally Ill?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 9, no. 5 (2014): 470–480.
19. Vernon, McCay, and Marjie Baughman. “Art, Madness, and Human Interaction.” Art Journal 31, no. 4 (1972): 413–420.