Is there a relationship between my poetry and psychosis?

You can tell me I’m crazy

Tell me I’m mad

Tell me I’m hazy

a lot or a tad.

because I know psychosis

is  just a fad

“The idea that ‘genius’ is just one step removed from ‘madness’ is a venerable one, and psychiatrists and psychologists have spent a great (perhaps an inordinate) amount of time looking for correlations between mental illness and creativity.”

“Now a new British study has examined whether poets exhibit more traits of psychosis than other people.”

“The researchers recruited 294 poets in an anonymous online survey; 92% of them had published their work. On the O-LIFE questionnaire, a self-report measure of psychotic symptoms, the poets scored above average on the “Unusual Experiences”, “Cognitive Disorganization” and “Impulsive Nonconformity” traits.”

You can call me impulsive

Tell me I’m mental

a fig I don’t give

about being a yentl*

 Mad genius eludes me

Cognitively disorganized ?

now THAT could be

“Furthermore, poets who described their work as  ‘avant-garde’ scored even higher on “Unusual Experiences” and on a questionnaire of mood disorder symptoms.”

“Rates of self-reported mental illnesses were also high

two poets (0.7%) reported schizophrenia, 15 reported bipolar disorder (5.1%), 152 reported depression (51.7%) and 80 reported anxiety disorder (27.2%).

Although actually these percentages are not that much higher than we see in the general population.”

“So it seems as though poets are more prone to psychosis – or at least, they think that they are. All of the traits were self-reported. Could it be that poets, having internalized the ‘mad genius’ archetype, are more prone to describe themselves in those terms?”

Article: Is there a relationship between poetry and psychosis?

*yentl
Extremely gullible person, one who will believe absolutely anything.