The Dark Side of the Writer's Mind

On April 18th, 1941, the body of a woman was found floating lifelessly in the Ouse River in Sussex England. The woman — later identified by her husband as famed author Virginia Woolf — was 59 years of age when she took her life. Eventually shared was a note left behind, which painted the picture of an artist exhausted from her struggle with mental illness, seemingly swallowed whole by the very mind that proved to be so prolific in writing.

The note, one of two that Woolf had penned just before wading fatefully into the Ouse, pockets full of stones, is a telling reminder of the often blurred line between a vibrant and imaginative mind and psychosis — unrelentingly toxic patterns of thought that manifest a nightmarish existence, ironically brought forth from that same well of creativity.

“I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times… I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate… I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read… I know that I am spoiling your life…”

Woolf wasn’t alone in her plight. Many other writers like her have ended their lives after being ensnared in a similar struggle. Hemingway is said to have plunged deeply into depression, delusion, and paranoia in the months before ending it all with a shotgun, though he suffered from the physical deterioration that likely played a heavily contributive role in his death wish. The ill-fated author of the Old Man and the Sea had several unsuccessful attempts, one of which even included attempting to walk into a moving airplane propeller. Gerard de Nerval, Anne Sexton, Cesare Pavesethe, Hunter S. Thompson, the list goes on. As both a writer and someone who has battled with mental illness his entire adult life, it’s always made me wonder: does a vivid imagination increase the potential for mental illness?

A Blurred Line

What exactly is mental illness? According to the American Psychological Association, “Mental illnesses are health conditions involving changes in emotion, thinking or behavior (or a combination of these). Mental illnesses are associated with distress and/or problems functioning in social, work or family activities.” Really clears it up, right? Fact is, at some point or another everyone I know has had symptoms that would place them somewhere in the realm of being mentally ill, even if these symptoms were transitory.

Nevertheless, one might argue that the true transition into mental illness is defined by the lack of agency over one’s imagination. And indeed, we see such phenomena in conditions like schizophrenia. But it is also present in arguably less severe conditions such as OCD — Intrusive thoughts continue to be one of the most terrifying things I have ever dealt with. Lower still on the scale of severity, we’ve all been overcome by a toxic inner monologue in one way or another, whether it pushed us into a jealous rage as the lover scorned, or appeared as an imagined outcome of a situation at work that caused anxiety, complete with physical symptoms. As innocuous as it might sound, how many times have you had a song repeating in your mind that you cannot shut off, regardless of how hard you try? Each of these blurs the line just a bit, no?

In no way am I equating the suffering of someone with schizophrenia with the trivial inconvenience of an earworm. What I am saying, is that the “threshold” may not be as binary as we commonly think about it as being. From a subjective standpoint, mental illness is not something that can be parsed down to a line in the sand — THAT, right there! That’s the border between “sanity” and mental illness. It’s like trying to define “normal”. When you strip the labeling off of what we call mental illness, it looks something more like a continuum, that we all exist on. Yep, I said it. We all suffer from symptoms of mental illness in one form or another. Welcome aboard. As someone who has suffered through the heavy stigma attached to mental health and of seeking help for symptoms, I also think this is a much better way of looking at things.

My “Credentials”

Perhaps I should’ve stated earlier that I am not a doctor, nor am I in any way affiliated with or involved in the field of mental health — It’s probably it’s pretty obvious. Am I out of my depth talking with any real, scientific authority on the subject? You bet. With that said, as someone who suffers from symptoms of what society has labeled as mental illness, I do have what I consider to be some room to speculate on the subject — as a subject. Some of my symptoms include depression, anxiety, obsessive/compulsive proclivities, manic highs, and debilitating lows.

As a sufferer of CPTSD, I’ve experimented with several medications throughout my life, a myriad of SSRIs, mood stabilizers, and other, less traditional medicines like cannabis and various psychedelics. I’ve sought therapy in many of its common forms. While some of these brought relief for periods, others have felt completely useless and may have even exacerbated the issues. To date, the most consistently effective attack on my symptoms of mental illness was brought about through mindfulness meditation — a subject I’ll write more on in the future.

As it turns out, creative types, especially writers, are alarmingly susceptible to mental illness. In fact, “being an author [is] specifically associated with increased likelihood of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, unipolar depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and suicide” (Kyaga et al. 1). Having struggled with symptoms all of my adult life to some degree or another, this was something I’ve always suspected intuitively. As far back as I can recall, my imagination has been running wild.

Discovering that my Mind was Different

As a child, sleep catapulted me into dreams that at times, felt more real than the waking state. I’d find myself wandering through the dilapidated halls of my elementary school alone for hours; the flat, earthy smell of chalk dust lingering in the air. Or, I’d suddenly be tens of thousands of feet in the air, engulfed in cobalt skies, soaring through billowy white clouds as an eagle, the icy briskness of the high altitude air felt intensely as it enveloped my body. Dying in my dreams felt as if I was truly experiencing death. I’ve been shot, stabbed, drowned, even eaten alive by a shark. Each death was tangibly experienced as if it were truly happening.

Upon awakening and recounting these dreams to friends and family, detail by detail the response was nearly always the same. “Wow, how do you remember all of that? How are your dreams so vivid?” The surprise always left me scratching my head. What did they mean? Didn’t everyone experience dreams this way?

In school, activities like creative writing always came intuitively to me, while other classes like Math and Spanish were painfully difficult due to my wandering imagination! Being able to tap into that spring of imagination was always second nature — though I actively avoided it due to reasons that I discuss here. This imaginative depth was a critical tool in my youth, allowing me to escape the horrors of the reality that I faced daily from a wickedly abusive stepfather.

Trauma and the Mind

Every human on the planet has or will experience some degree of trauma throughout their life. One of the key coping mechanisms we employ as humans to combat trauma is creativity. As Louise DeSalvo, author of Writing as a Way of Healing puts it, “Creativity is a basic human response to trauma and a natural emergency defense system”. In my own life, this creativity often acted as an escape room.

In retrospect, I recall my child mind very vividly turning my reality into an almost cartoon version of the hell that I was truly experiencing. In one instance — at what I imagine was six or seven years old — I remember being in a strange limbo between sleepwalking and awakening which involved me being chased by a lion and narrowly avoiding being eaten as I took refuge in a tree. The reality was that I was running away from a monster of a man who seemed to be set on killing me for missing the toilet after getting up to pee in the middle of the night. I scurried up the ladder of my bunk-bed and hid under the blankets, just out of his reach.

Instances of trauma like this remind me that much of my imagination was forged as a protective measure and came at a great cost. Yet it wouldn’t always seem like such an ally. A decade later, the very imagination, coupled with years of unaddressed trauma laid the brickwork for a compulsive substance abuse problem. Somewhere in between being a child and being launched abruptly into the strange, novel stage of adulthood, my mind had seemed to turn on me.

Gone were the escapes into the former cartoon-like, softened versions of reality. These were replaced with a malevolent inner critic that seemed to watch every move I made, so that no action was done — or not done — without a visceral tension attached to it. Because I identified as that voice, I believed every word of what it said. And boy, did it say a lot. Every word out of my mouth was criticized and second-guessed. Reality and I were distant strangers, and I was caught in a never-ending torrent of malignant thought patterns. My imagination, once a sanctuary from trauma, had now imprisoned me with it.

The only escape from this prison came in the form of mind-altering substances — another pervasive phenomenon in the creative world. My preferred poison? Alcohol. Drinking had given me a temporary ability to mute the toxic voice in my mind. Suddenly I had been transformed into a version of myself that wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, or at least it seemed. I became what I believed to be the true me, someone who had been hiding in the shadows for years.

Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on one’s perspective — this was merely suppression of this inner toxicity. Soon enough, it would come bubbling to the surface like a corrosive gas, up through the dark ocean of booze that for a while, had held it at bay. In a tale as old as time, my life began to fall apart in a dysfunctional landslide. What began as an escape, had become yet another prison. I’d go back and forth from sobriety to alcohol for a decade or so until finally, exhausted with running, I began to deal with the traumatic memories that had haunted me for years; another story altogether.

Closing Thoughts

For every strength, there is a story. My imagination was forged through trauma. Think about that for a second. Amazingly, an adaptive mind enveloped a child in vivid colors and imagery to protect him and allow an escape from the cruelty of the world around him. Perhaps this was to allow him to imagine better days that lie ahead, or maybe it acted simply as a distraction from the pain and fear that pervaded his world. If nothing else, this insight has prompted me to use the creativity that I earned.

It has also opened my eyes to the potential for a much darker side of the creative mind to appear, something that I feel is oftentimes forgotten about. While I’m not claiming that creativity is causal to mental illness, I believe that its pervasive correlation with trauma makes it like the flip side of a coin. Awareness and openness with discussion on this front creates an environment that empowers others to talk about and seek help with their struggles. It also works to diminish the paralyzing stigma that still exists surrounding the subject. By and large, I feel that as a society we are making progress to this end.

Works Cited

Kyaga, Simon, et al. “Mental Illness, Suicide and Creativity: 40-Year Prospective Total Population Study.” Journal of Psychiatric Research, vol. 47, no. 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 83–90. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.jpsychires.2012.09.010.