“Their Lives A Storm Whereon They Ride”:
The Affective Disorders and College Composition
Stephanie Stone Horton
Aristotle asked, “Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy,
poetry or the arts are melancholic?” Composition research has largely
ignored the affective disorders – depression and bipolar disorder – and their
influence on student writing. This is remarkable, as depression abounds in the
college population. In a 2008 study of 26,685 undergraduates, nearly 25
percent reported depressive symptoms affecting academic performance. Yet,
these writers remain marginalized by our profession. Depression can cause
severe writing blocks; depressed brains show a pronounced slowing of
frontal and temporal lobe activity. Mania can spark intense creativity, but
also can escalate to a functional breakdown. This paper traces the reflections,
writing creativity and dysfunction of a first-year writer with a DSM-IV
Bipolar I diagnosis. Now is a time of great exigency for research; this
student’s generation is the first to receive early diagnosis and medical
intervention. Among these student writers could be a Woolf, a Hemingway,
or a David Foster Wallace. In its 2009 Disability Statement, CCCC
recognizes “a wide range of visible and invisible disabilities – cognitive,
learning, emotional, psychological, and physical,” emphasis mine.
Compositionists study race, gender, class, and all manner of difference and
disability. Why not this?
Key Words
Bipolar disorder, depression, mania, composition studies, writer’s block,
writing research, college writers.
*****
I sit down religiously every morning. In the course of a
working day of eight hours, I write three sentences, which I
erase before leaving the table in despair. The effort I put out
should give birth to Masterpieces as big as mountains, and it
brings forth a ridiculous mouse now and then. - Joseph
Conrad letter to E. Garnett, March 1898, describing writer’s
block during a depressive episode. In: The Collected Letters of
Joseph Conrad. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.
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“Their Lives a Storm Whereon They Ride”:
The Affective Disorders and Student Composition
Here’s the worst of it. I’ll sit there, staring at the screen for four
hours, eeking out three sentences in that whole time, and
deleting those. Everything I manage to write sounds like shit. First-year college writer with Bipolar I disorder, on writer’s
block during depressive episode. Interviewed Atlanta, GA,
September 2009.
The demon dwells in the genes.
My father was “touched,” as was his father before him. Our family
has its requisite suicides - the distant relative who stepped off a 28-story
building, the cousin who shot himself, the great-uncle who died by his own
hand, method unknown. In the 1920s, shame often went unrecorded.
None of us knew about affective disorder. None of us were writers,
until I came along. It would be my privilege to connect those worlds.
I was 22, a news writer and recent Phi Beta Kappa journalism
graduate, when it hit. If I ever thought about depression, I thought it meant
sadness over an event, something one worked through in counseling,
something decidedly other. I didn’t connect this word to the static, soft at
first, then the clicking, then the short-circuiting of my thought processes, or
to the rising horror, the memory loss, the agonizing overnights at work just to
finish my stories at a pace of three words per hour. I descended into paranoia,
an irrational fear for my life. I was a gaunt young woman with falling-out
hair, gripping an Exacto-knife while locking up the newsroom to face a
parking lot full of serial killers.
The novelist William Styron shared this aberrant neurochemistry. Of
the brain in severe depression, he wrote: “It is a storm, but a storm of murk . .
. of slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back
close to zero.”1 At its worst, it is a neurological hell, a “fiercely overheated
room” from which there are no exits and no escape; as Styron wrote, “you
begin to yearn for death.” I left my job as a professional writer. When
waitressing became too mentally challenging, I felt the nearness of the street.
Depression stopped my writing for fifteen years. Meanwhile, my
intelligent, beautiful daughter turned out to be profoundly bipolar, as manic
as I was depressed. For her, writing was not the painful laying out of words
like pebbles, two or three per hour, but the rare syndrome of hypergraphia:
boxes and boxes of journals, scribbled in a dense hand from cover to cover.
Her complaints -“The sun is too loud” - differed from those of other teens.
Despite medication, she battled first mania, and then depression. Her walls
and furniture were covered with writing, but school papers required a dozen
false starts. When I saw her crouching in agony at the computer, I knew.
Stephanie Stone Horton
3
My field - composition studies - has largely ignored the affective
disorders and how they may affect student writing. This is remarkable.
Clinical depression abounds in the traditional college-age population; ten
percent of U.S. college students are under treatment for depression or bipolar
disorder.2 Brain research has exposed the demon; brain mappings show a
pronounced slowing of frontal and temporal lobe activity in the depressed
brain.3 This is the neurological murk of writer’s block that Styron described.
PET scans use deep blues and greens to map the metabolic “throttle down” of
depression, the “poverty of ideas,” and the memory impairment of writer’s
block. The manic brain, conversely, is lit like a Christmas tree with reds,
yellows and oranges.4 Bipolar illness is painful and exhilarating, crippling,
and intensely creative; the list of writers with known and suspected bipolar
illness spans the centuries. Yet in 2010, the illness remains undisclosed by
students, unrecognized by instructors, and undiscussed by our profession.
Composition studies examines writing across a rich field of
difference. In its 2009 Disability Statement, the Conference on College
Composition and Communication recognized “a wide range of visible and
invisible disabilities - cognitive, learning, emotional, psychological, and
physical” - while challenging “narrow conceptions of disability as a flaw or
deficit.”5 Compositionists study race, gender and class; we examine all
manner of difference and disability. Why not test Aristotle’s famous
rhetorical question: “Why is it that all men who are outstanding in
philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?
For me, the torture inflicted by Bipolar I (or the demon, or the black
bile, or the limbic/hypothalamic/pituitary imbalance, choose your era)
reached the extremity of human experience. I still don’t know how I survived
it. The pain was like labor, only unceasing. After fifteen years, I began to
write again. Yet no two sufferers are alike; the illness manifests across a wide
spectrum. “Julie” is a 20-year-old sophomore at a small liberal arts college.
She describes her experience as a student with Bipolar I disorder specifically, the heady state of hypomania:
When I’m hypomanic, I can write a paper in two hours – you
know, proving the existence of God using string theory, that
sort of thing. But I don’t proofread. That would mean sitting
still for two extra minutes! When I’m depressed, I proofread
very well - but it takes me eight hours. The way I see it, the
‘bipolar’ part is creative. The ‘disorder’ part is destructive, like
chains. I never find creativity in insanity, in full-fledged mania
or depression. I find it in the middle, or on the road back.
Students like “Julie” populate college writing classes. Among them
may be a Conrad, a Hemingway, a Woolf, a David Foster Wallace; the last
4
“Their Lives a Storm Whereon They Ride”:
The Affective Disorders and Student Composition
three fought affective illness as long as they could before succumbing. What
kind of anguish prompted Virginia Woolf to walk into the river, stones in
pockets? What kind of mania produced Infinite Jest? Recent studies show
that writers as a broad group have eight to ten times the rate of major
depression as the general population; poets are eighteen times more likely to
end life in suicide than the rest of us.6 The pedigree charts in Kay Jamison’s
Touched With Fire, a brilliant study of the affective disorders and creativity,
give us a visual overview of this genetic, intensely familial illness: bipolar
illness, depression, and suicide occurred throughout the pedigrees of Johnson
and Boswell, Tennyson, Coleridge, the Jameses, Melville and Hemingway,
Lowell and Sexton, among many others. Like the young Byron, these writers
were buffeted by emotional illness, “their lives a storm whereon they ride.”7
Bipolar disorder is a genetically based neurotransmitter imbalance;
it is not a cluster of psychological problems treatable through counseling or
therapy alone. Academic myths about the disorders include the following:
bipolar can “caused” by familial, societal, racial, or gender barriers to selfexpression; that bipolar can be “healed” by therapeutic writing; that episodes
can be “triggered” by the “wrong” writing assignment; and that all writers
with bipolar disorder have creative genius.7
For Julie, the milder states of depression and hypomania yield the
richest creativity, while extreme states of mania and severe depression shut it
down:
When I write something in mild depression, people have
remarked that I have amazing insight into whatever it is I’m
writing about, which is usually dark. But it is insight. I find it
funny that once you get deep inside of something, it
automatically becomes depressing. But as far as the deeper
stages of depression - you can be über-intelligent, but this
illness is a plague. It’s very difficult to fight . . . When you’re
about to drop a blow dryer in the bathtub, writing a paper for
class tomorrow really doesn’t matter, because you’re about to
enter the netherworld. And true mania - imagine having two
giant speakers tied to your ears, and all the colors are cranked
up in intensity, and you’re seeing everything in excruciating
definition and detail, and you can’t sit down or sleep. Try to
write in the middle of that.
Writing instructors typically do not recognize the symptoms of
affective illness; this is fair, as we are a profession of teachers, not therapists.
Some of us understand there may be more than laziness or incompetence
Stephanie Stone Horton
5
behind some missing and late assignments. Most of us miss the rich textual
markers of the illness, including multiplicity of metaphor, puns, black humor,
neologisms, tangential writing, and death references. Qualitative studies can
explore the relation between discourse, cognition and memory, and
invention; they also could describe students’ experiential world as writers.
“Julie,” describing her freshman year, pokes fun at the hyperbolic, self
centered euphoria of her own hypomania: “Stuff pops up from my
subconscious like a Whack-A-Mole,” she said. “I think in metaphors. I talk in
metaphors. I have to use metaphors because I’m up to my eyeballs in slow
people. I have to explain myself somehow.”
“Julie” is young, but she is far from alone in the world of bipolar
writers. Over fifteen years, researcher Nancy Andreasen followed thirty
creative-writing faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, publishing findings
in The American Journal of Psychiatry.8 The data surprised Andreasen and
other psychiatrists, but it did not register in many other fields, including the
relatively new field of composition studies. Andreasen had hypothesized a
connection between schizophrenia and writing creativity; however, she could
not find a single case of schizophrenia in the Iowa faculty group. What the
data did reveal, however, was remarkable: eighty percent of the Iowa writing
faculty suffered from an affective disorder - mainly bipolar disorder - or had
experienced an episode at some point in their lives.9 Of the control group,
only 30 percent reported a lifetime episode of affective disorder Indeed, two
study participants on the Iowa writing faculty committed suicide during the
term of the study; a review of research by Goodwin and Jamison found that
20 percent of people with Bipolar I illness eventually die by their own hand,
so painful is the malady.10. Intriguingly, the first-degree relatives of the
writing faculty were “riddled with both creativity and mental illness,” with
these traits only “randomly scattered” among the relatives of controls.11
Andreasen concludes that for the Iowa writers, affective disorders are both “a
hereditary taint and a hereditary gift.”12
Rarely has a research topic come at a time of greater exigency. The
1990s saw a proliferation of pharmaceutical and medical research into the
affective disorders. Because the disorders are genetically based, and
symptoms can appear early in life, doctors have begun to diagnose and treat
teenage and even elementary-age children in the last 15 years, although this
practice is not without controversy. This first generation to receive early
psychiatric intervention currently fills our college classrooms.
Many of them gravitate to the arts. Neurological researcher Alice
Flaherty, in The Midnight Disease, describes how, one morning soon after
she gave birth to stillborn twins, her grief suddenly transformed into a state
of exuberant energy as she burst with a million creative ideas - and knew she
was gravely ill.13Like my daughter, Flaherty experienced hypergraphia - the
overpowering compulsion to write night and day. In subsequent research, she
6
“Their Lives a Storm Whereon They Ride”:
The Affective Disorders and Student Composition
asked, “Why are there so many mentally ill people in the creative arts especially writers?” Flaherty dispels the notion that people with mental
disorders are drawn to the arts because they’re unsuited to work in
accounting firms (think Byron and his dorm-room bear keeping). They are
drawn to the arts, she insists, because many of them are artists.14
Writers with bipolar illness whiplash between depression (Petrarch’s
“dark inferno and most bitter death”) and mania, with its flight of ideas,
hypercreativity, hyperenergy, hypersensitivity, and hypersexuality. The mind,
the locus of writing, will be the research frontier of this century. Studies of
race, gender, workplace, culture- all are indispensable. But the writer’s mind
is the sky where all these fronts collide; the ensuing storms warrant
meteorological research.
Little was lost on “Julie” in her freshman year. Her manic episodes
ran alongside a deep spirituality, a ruminative capability:
When Rilke said “Every angel is terror,” I immediately thought
of the two pillars of light I see when my brain goes on
overdrive. I perceive everything on overdrive, and it’s too
intense. We’re not built to handle everyday presence. Rilke’s
Elegies said to me, ‘If I cried out, who would hear me? If we
spoke to God and he spoke back, would that make things any
easier? Would our heads explode? What if God just tells us to
accept where we are? And if we did manage to prove that God
exists, then there would be no faith, and without faith, God is
nothing. So if we proved he exists, he would immediately
cease to exist. And then we’d really be f*#%ed.’
The demon dwelled in Darwin, too. Writer Jonah Lehrer described
Darwin’s battle with his own genes in The New York Times: “He despaired of
the weakness of mind that ran in his family . . . His depression left him ‘not
able to do anything one day out of three.’”15 This was a revelation; I didn’t
know Darwin was depressed, much less that he had sporadic work habits. But
I laughed out loud at what Darwin wrote next, about himself: “The race is for
the strong,” he said. “I shall probably do little more but be content to admire
the strides others made in Science,” 16 emphasis mine.
I laughed - not at Darwin’s pain, but at the all-too-familiar anti-logic
of depression. It’s a shield that makes us impervious to success, pride, love,
the joy of work. I pictured Darwin’s devoted wife Emma saying, for the
thousandth time, “Now, Charles! Just look at what you’ve done in life!” Her
words would have bounced off his shield, barely making a scratch. Like
Darwin, one of our first-year writers might change the world; it’s probably
Stephanie Stone Horton
7
the one we’d never guess, the one who sits in the back, shields raised. Why
bother with these students? And speaking of Darwin, why haven’t they
cycled out of the gene pool? After all, as Lehrer points out, the Pleistocene
hunter-gatherer didn’t spend much time in rumination and self-loathing. 17
Why are these disorders still around, and why are they associated with
creativity? For Lehrer, depression is intertwined with an obsessive cognitive
style that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art;
ruminative depressives in some ways have a firmer grip on reality, a deeper
vision. For “Julie”:
If you present something to me, I’ll hyperfocus on it, because
I’m depressed and my brain is moving too slowly to move on
to something else. So I’ll just hyperfocus on it for three hours,
and because of that, I’ll just realize something about it. Not
everything I write is creative or phenomenal. It has varying
degrees of insight, creativity, and reasoning.
“Julie” inspired me to make a solemn vow to the universe. From
now on, as a college writing instructor, I will listen first and fail later the next
time a student attends only one class out of three. I will gently ascertain if
there are difficulties, campus resource numbers at the ready. I probably won’t
ask her if the sun is too loud, though. I wouldn’t want her to think I’m crazy.
Notes
1
W Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, Vintage, New York,
1990, p.47.
2
The American College Health Association Reference Group, National
College Healh Assessment Executive Summary Fall 2008, Baltimore, ACHA,
viewed 09 November 09, <http://www.acha-ncha.org/docs/ACHANCHA_Reference_Group_Report_Fall2008.pdf>
3
A Flaherty, ‘Frontotemporal and dopaminergic control of idea generation
and creative drive,’ The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 493.1, pp.147153, 25 July 2005, viewed 01 November 2009.
4
E Taylor, The Atlas of Bipolar Disorders, Taylor and Francis, London,
2006, p. 47.
5
CCCC Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition, ‘A Policy
Statement on Disability,’ The Conference on College Composition and
Communication, 10 September 2009, viewed on 15 December 2009. <
http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/disabilitypolicy >.
6
K Jamison, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic
Temperament, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1993, p. 89.
8
“Their Lives a Storm Whereon They Ride”:
The Affective Disorders and Student Composition
7
L DiPaula, ‘A Chaotic Companion: Writers and Writing with Bipolar
Disorder,’ unpublished dissertation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania,
2007.
8
N. Andreasen, ‘Creativity and Mental Illness: Prevalence Rates in Writers
and First-Degree Relatives,’ American Journal of Psychiatry 144, 1987, pp.
1288-1292.
9
ibid, p. 1292.
10
F. Goodwin and K. Jamison, ‘Suicide,’ in Manic-Depressive Illness, New
York, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 227-244.
11
Andreasen, p. 1292.
12
Andresen, p. 1292.
13
A. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block,
and The Creative Brain, Boston, Mariner, 2005, p. 11.
14
ibid, p. 65
15
J. Lehrer, ‘The Upside of Depression,’ The New York Times Online, 06
February 2010, viewed 02 June 2010, < www.nytimes.com>.
Bibliography
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Healh Assessment II Executive Summary Fall 2008. Baltimore, ACHA,
viewed 09 November 09, <http://www.acha-ncha.org/docs/ACHANCHA_Reference_Group_Report_Fall2008.pdf>
Andreasen, N., ‘Creativity and Mental Illness: Prevalence Rates in Writers
and First-Degree Relatives’. American Journal of Psychiatry 144, 1987, pp.
1288-1292.
CCCC Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition, ‘A Policy
Statement on Disability in CCCC’. The Conference on College Composition
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Disorder’. Unpublished dissertation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania,
2007.
Flaherty, A., The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and
The Creative Brain. Boston, Mariner, 2005, p. 11-16, 65.
Stephanie Stone Horton
9
Goodwin, F., and Jamison, K., ‘Suicide’. In Manic-Depressive Illness, New
York, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 227-244.
Jamison, K., Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic
Temperament. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1993, p.89.
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2010, viewed 02 June 2010, < www.nytimes.com>.
Styron, W., Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. Vintage, New York,
1990, p.47.
Stephanie Stone Horton is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at
Georgia State University.