Bipolar Patients Tend to Have Higher Creativity

Jakarta, "There is no great genius who ever lived without having some kind of madness," said Aristotle. Now psychiatrists have found seems to greeting the Greek philosophers had a point.

The researchers studied 300,000 people are hospitalized because of mental illness and found patients who have bipolar disorder are more likely to work in creative professions.

Family of bipolar patients who do not have mental disorders are also more likely to engage in creative work as designers, artists, musicians, writers or university professors.

Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depressive disorder and affects about 1 percent of the population in the U.S.. Bipolar is characterized by extreme mood swings are very unstable from the very happy and then suddenly become very sad or depressed.

Bipolar disorder can last for days or even months. Unlike normal mood changes, mood swings in bipolar patients with very severe that it interferes with the performance.

"Most people who are creative do not have a mental illness, and most people who are mentally ill are usually not creative. But there is a disproportionate rate of mental disorders, especially bipolar disorder, in individuals who are very creative," said researcher Professor Kay Redfield from Johns Hopkins University of Medicine as dukutip from The Independent, Friday (4/11/201).

"It is not known why it happens, but there may be a gene that creativity does not only play a role in certain types of professions, but in bipolar as well," said Dr. Lori Altshuler of UCLA Mood Disorders Research Program who did not participate in the study.

"Bipolar patients have an unusual anatomy of the brain. Reduced settings frontal brain that play a role in influencing the ability of the amygdala and striatum affective thus enhancing affective instability and kompulsifitas," said Katherine P. Rankin, Ph.D. from the University of California-San Francisco.

The idea of ​​the settings seems to cause a reduction in bipolar patients are more sensitive and reactive to external stimuli.

"The brain creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment," said Katherine.