Creativity and Depression - an Interview with Dr. Eric Maisel

Dr. Eric Maisel is the author of The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path to Depression. My blog today consists of several questions and Dr. Maisel's responses, as well as my thoughts about what he has to say.

Q. Dr. Maisel, can you tell us what the Van Gogh Blues is about?

 EM: For more than 25 years, I've been looking at the realities of the creative life and the make-up of the creative person in books like Fearless Creating, Creativity for Life, Coaching the Artist Within, and lots of others. A certain theme or idea began to emerge: that creative people are people who stand in relation to life in a certain way - they see themselves as active meaning-makes rather than as passive folks with no stake in the world and no inner potential to realize. This orientation makes meaning a certain kind of problem for them - if, in their own estimation, they aren't making sufficient meaning, they get down. I began to see that this "simple" dynamic helped explain why so many creative people - I would say all of us at one time or another time - get the blues. To say this more crisply, it seemed to me that the depression that we see in creative people was best conceptualized as existential depression, rather than as biological, psychological, or social depression. This meant that the treatment had to be existential in nature. You could medicate a depressed artist but you probably weren't really getting at what was bothering him, namely that the meaning had leaked out of his life and that, as a result, he was just going through the motions, paralyzed by his meaning crisis.

I'm very drawn to the idea that creative people need to make meaning in their lives. It rings true for me. I was diagnosed with biological depression nearly 20 years ago. Medication helps. However, throughout my life, I've felt a call to DO something with my life. The problem is that I can't figure out what. Not yet anyway. I've looked at different aspects of my life and made changes. If those things don't work, I think and reflect and work and listen and try another way. I hope that the things I do as well as the things I don't do are preparing me to answer some call, but perhaps there is more meaning in the life I currently lead than I recognize. Or maybe my call is to continue to struggle through everything that threatens to pull me down in the quicksand of depression. Or maybe I haven't yet faced this most important issue. Maybe the journey I've chosen allows me to escape my call. I could be headed in the wrong direction. Maybe the medications have kept the depression at bay, but if I'd been addressing the meaning question all this time I'd be in a different place in my journey, one that feels more like home (although I don't expect that finding meaning in my life means ease or comfort).

Q. So you're saying that a person who decides, for whatever reason, that she is going to be a "meaning maker," is more likely to get depressed by virtue of that very decision. In addition to telling herself that she matters and that her creative work matters, what else should she do to "keep meaning afloat" in her life? What else helps?

E.M: I think is is a great help just to have a "vocabulary of meaning" and to have language to use so that you know what is going on in your life. If you can't accurately name a thing, it is very hard to think about that thing. That's why I present a whole vocabulary of meaning in The Van Gogh Blues and introduce ideas and phrases like "meaning effort," "meaning drain," "meaning container," and many others. When we get a rejection letter, we want to be able to say, "Oh, this is a meaning threat to my life as a novelist" and instantly reinvest meaning in our decision to write novels, because if we don't think that way and speak that way, it is terribly easy to let that rejection letter precipitate a meaning crisis and get us seriously blue. By reminding ourselves that it is our job not only to make meaning but also to maintain meaning when it is threatened, we get in the habit of remembering that we and we alone are in charge of keeping meaning afloat - no one else will do that for us. Having a vocabulary of meaning available to talk about these matters is a crucial part of the process.

As a writer, I find meaning in words. I hope that a vocabulary of meaning will help me to understand and maintain the meaning in my life.

Q. What I hear you saying is that when creative people in particular maintain a connection to their mission or purpose (you call it a Life Purpose Statement in VGB), a connection to the value of their work, and their own value as creative people in the culture, they will be stronger in their work and in their lives. Is that a fair way to put it?

EM: Yes. Even before you can make meaning, you must nominate yourself as the meaning-maker in your own life and fashion a central connection with yourself, one that is more aware, active, and purposeful than the connection most people fashion with themselves. Having some ideas about purpose is not the same as standing in relationship to yourself in such a way that you turn your ideas about purpose into concrete actions. Self-connection - understanding that you are your own advocate, taskmaster, coach, best friend, and sole arbiter of meaning and that no one else can or will serve those functions for you - is crucial.

I know myself well, but I'm rather hard on myself. I hope that as I work with the ideas in this book, I can become better integrated and that being connected with myself in a kinder way will also help with meaning and depression. I haven't finished readng the book yet, but I think it's one I'll be reading and working through for a long time. I need to do the work if I want a meaning-filled life. It isn't just going to happen to me. I'm also going to have to get myself past the anti-God theme that runs throughout the book. Dr. Maisel is an athiest and anti-religionist. I have to sift out what I can't use, because there is so much of value here, even for a committed Catholic like me.

Next stop on the virtual book tour - Billizetti's World on March 8.