The 'tortured' or 'starving' artist

The 'tortured' or 'starving' artist

"We've got a whole bunch of tortured artists," psychologist Perpetua Neo told Business Insider, speaking on the proposed link between mental illness and creativity. "A lot of them draw on their tortured selves to create meaning and create art."

Artists can be pretty unhappy people, she said, and they are often quite honest about that fact. "But at the same time, as a psychologist, I would ask if perhaps they need to believe, to create their identity, to be an artist with a tortured soul."

It ties in with the idea of the "starving artist," where people sacrifice their wellbeing in order to focus on their art — living on minimum expenses, spending whatever they have on their art projects.

"If you're always going to be that way and take it as your identity, you're going to make choices that lead you down that road," Neo said. "There's this idea, this perception, that I don't know how to manage money, I'm bad at this, I don't know how to be commercial. And of course, if you think that, you're going to stay there that way."

With the tortured artist identity, they may believe their creativity is a form of therapy, to create a fantastical kind of world to the real one we live in.

But if that therapy starts to not work anymore, what happens then? Is that why Virginia Woolf swam into the middle of a river and drowned herself? Is it why Sylvia Plath put her head in an oven, while her children slept in the next room?

"This therapy only has a certain kind of effect," Neo said. "After they create this art, they still feel a bit lost, then obviously there's a limit to how much this art will help them."