ترجمة ...رأي د. كيرك سنيدر والذي يرفض فيه العلاقة بين الابداع والمرض العقلي

The testing techs issue

Creativity, mental illness and simplistic labels
WHILE THE RECENT section, "Considering Creativity" (November Monitor ), was illuminating in many respects, I found the rather casual use of the term "mental illness" in association with creative individuals both devaluing and misleading. Because "mental illness" implies a discrete boundary between neuro- physiological health and disease and because that boundary is so notoriously elusive, I find the term problematic when applied to the population as a whole, let alone when applied to a population as resilient and productive as the creative.
While many creative people suffer and live tumultuous lives, this is distinctly different from the characterization that they are mentally ill--which implies that they are diseased individuals, quantitatively and qualitatively more debilitated than apparently "healthy" individuals whose brains are "normal."
But is normal really healthy, and is mental suffering really reducible to disease? Consider, for example, whether the adherents of the Spanish Inquisition, the throngs who supported Hitler, or, closer to our own disturbing heritage, the masses who have supported bigots, have normal brains?
While it may be true that some creative individuals have some identifiable brain pathologies associated with depression, mania, anxiety and the like, it is not clear that such pathologies are any more debilitating, and therefore disease-like, than the countless examples of disturbance and inhumanity that we fail to label as mental illness.
My hope then is that psychology can be a little more nuanced than its medically anchored counterpart, psychiatry, when it comes to describing human experience that is of such a subtle and profound nature.
KIRK J. SCHNEIDER
PHD Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco