PaulaHOST, a long-time member and volunteer on this site, disagrees wholeheartedly with this view. She writes:
I'd like to speak frankly on this subject. I'm an artist, poet, writer, and professional musician. I have what may be the most severe flavor of bipolar disorder. I've also been in full remission for eleven years.
Mania toys with our perception of who we are. I am a very creative person, there is no doubt about that, but I perceived myself to be creative in a highly superior way during my periods of mania. I wasn't. It was self-deception.
The ability to be artistic combined with the hyper-agitation of mania does not make a person superior in the creativity department. It just makes the person miserable, difficult to live with, insomniac and suicidal. And it's a vicious cycle that keeps getting worse and worse and harder to live with without the proper treatment. Our self-perceptions also tend to become more warped until we believe anything that our neurotransmitter-impaired minds tell us - even if it's not based in reality.
And the worst part, is that we can't see it.
I think it's a lousy tradeoff, personally.
I'm an artist, and I want it all. I want the wonderful creative energy, and I want the mania and all the other problems that goes with bipolar disorder gone. I made it my goal to find a way to have both - and I did. I found out that I CAN have it all. You can, too.
I have straddled both sides of the fence, and I can tell you this: I had no idea how good, how really good, it could be with the mania gone. I think now about all those years that I wasted piddling around and it makes me just want to cry.
I didn't really begin to expand creatively until the mania and the depression moved out of the picture completely. I'm currently undergoing a creative expansion in my life like I've never experienced before, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the way - no lost sleep, no depression, no mood switches, no hyper-agitation, no distractibility, and no suicidal ideation. Talk about increased productivity. This is 100 percent creative energy at its best.
