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The relationship between creativity and mental health has attracted the interest of many psychologists over the past decades. Some past studies have found that creativity is sometimes linked to mental health difficulties, while others collected opposing or inconsistent results.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Karolinska Institutet and other institutions recently set out to further explore the relationship between creativity and mental health by analyzing questionnaire results collected from thousands of twins living in Sweden. Their findings, published in Molecular Psychiatry, suggest that this link is greatly influenced by how creativity is measured, which could explain why earlier studies reached conflicting conclusions.

"There is a longstanding idea that genius and 'madness' go hand in hand, particularly in creative fields, with many famous artists believed to have struggled with mental health problems," Miriam A. Mosing, co-senior author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.

"However, the empirical evidence for this association remains mixed. We examined this question for the first time using a highly comprehensive data set, combining longitudinal and genetically informative data with multiple indicators of creativity and both self-reported and registry-based measures of mental health."

Mosing and her colleagues analyzed data collected as part of two surveys run in 2012–2013 and 2022–2023, respectively. These data were collected from a total of 14,658 individual twins living in Sweden, 6,419 of whom participated in both surveys.

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