[junko]

My own experience led me to a slightly different conclusion.

I'm considered to be "creative" by my peers as I enjoy the arts and applying them for practical use. Contrary to the article, I found that I was significantly less creative when I was depressed. What was extremely frustrating was that it all felt 'stuck' - you can imagine a composer letting out his black-hole reservoir of pain and sadness in a stream of intense, out-of-world music, a cry for the greater ... but sadly for me it was less romantic. I just got stuck. Unable to speak properly, unable to write or draw or express anything for that matter. And yet it felt like I was ready to explode.

Now that I've recovered and drawn a line to separate those demons, I can get intellectual. One consequence of depression is too much noise; of bad chattering and self cruelty and emptiness. Emptiness can also be crushing. That could explain why I couldn't be 'creative' at all.

On the other hand, the author of the article mentioned a very good point:

>>Negative emotions appeared when they fell on hard times financially, when their health became poor or especially when a close relative died.

But I interpret this slightly differently. Poverty gives pain but I don't think this is the part that gives rise to creativity. I grew up in a very rural area where there was nothing interesting to do like video games and cinemas. That was when I was at my most creative and proactive, like using poor materials to make something really awesome and crazy. I prefer to call this "resourcefulness" but thinking about it now, maybe that is what creativity is all about: the ability to transform something deemed to be poor or average into another thing that is so much more than the sum of its parts. It's a weird irony that when my family moved to a "richer" environment, I found myself hopelessly stuck. Here are the things all laid out for me to draw and model. Here are the information to do this and that. Here's an infinite supply of paper. What a joykiller.

[SunShiranui]

To me this feels like a... difference between depression and sadness.

Personally I tend to think of depression as draining; it takes out your energy, your willingness to live your life and push through. Like you said, emptiness.

Sadness feels... sad, it brings you down, but it doesn't necessarily affect you in the same 'draining' way.

[junko]

Edit: This turned out to be a mini memoir, please skip if irrelevant to you

This is veering off-topic so apologies. I tried to match my experience with the feelings described by the author in the article, but yes, you're right, depression can be much more than that. Now I say can because I visualise depression as a spiral, not necessarily consistent throughout, but definitely like a bottomless well. The feeling of being a "pressure cooker" is a level of depression, but I'm tempted to say that it's not the worst. The worst, and the most dangerous, I felt was self-transparency, where I lost all sense of what makes "me" and the world feels like a ghost and passes straight through. It was much more than numbness, it was emptiness that felt more white than black, yet I remember tears that won't stop welling, of shaking and shivering and lots of switching offs, usually to actual sleep. This was different to melancholy though, this was really the point when you don't consider but believe that you're absolutely and weightlessly nothing - and consequently there is no difference in physical life and death. There's no more anger nor confusion, just whispers of what's the point. I know that all this sounds poetic (and I haven't covered all that precedes this point such as guilt/imposter/self-ripping) but damn it wasn't beautiful. Suicide might be an idea my mind fiercely puts a gate around, but the desire for death creeps in anyway: there were a few incidents when my foot slowed down when crossing the road, when I walked alone at midnight ... no it wasn't nice.

I'm glad no harm came to me. It turned out that the worst was actually the beginning of my recovery; I managed to hold on for a little longer (thank you to my few friends and family) and gradually the world trickled in. I became fascinated by the sky though it hurt my eyes, but it had so many colours with clouds of different shapes, and a depth that showed that there is much much more beyond. Then the sounds came in. And looking at small children, I realised that I had become one too because we spoke the same language. It was very strange, but that was when I first felt happy! And proud and glad that I had hold on after all.

Falling into the spiral is like your world collapsing into a pile of cards. But let it collapse, and be patient: you will have the chance to rebuild, except with a cleaner slate and more thought for the now and the future. Just need to hold on for a little longer, and sleep, lots of sleep.

[iliis]

Thank you, that was very beautifully put!

Have you seen "Inside out"? In that movie, joy and sadness are depicted as two characters cooperating whereas depression sets in when these two are absent and the infrastructure starts to shut down and crumble...

[junko]

I feel that "Inside Out" is more of a rites of passage story, where the falling of those childhood 'infrastructures' is due to change, especially disruptive ones (just the denial of "sadness" felt a little too simplistic).

But I think with depression, there is less 'logic'; it's much harder for you to follow what the hell is going on. Kinda like a big mess of yarn that's so knotted up you really wanna grab a pair of scissors and cut them up, and throw them in the fire for good measure. It's destructive, and that's why depression is awfully dangerous. Now you might think that the process itself will lead to that blank slate - I gave a pile of cards metaphor earlier - enabling a chance to build better and even turn the experience to some sort of character enrichment. But it's not that glamorous; not everyone can hold on for that long. I do count myself extremely lucky.

But one thing the film definitely got right was the concept of support. Riley eventually got through by allowing herself to break down and tell her parents everything, acknowledging the bits that she consciously feels to be weak, pathetic et cetra, like sadness. And that's really important for someone who's depressed; you will not be able to help yourself. Contrary to your belief, you need outside support to help you battle those demons and tell you that A is A and not a+b+c-d. It might be difficult to find good support, and initially I didn't either, but I knew my mom to be fundamentally caring about me and by approaching her, we slowly went down the road to detangle the mess. I'm not gonna kid, it was rocky as we didn't have a very good relationship, but we got there eventually. And learnt a bit more about humanity.

[evo_9]

I agree with this. I find that when I'm down/depressed, esp. from a major life change I 100% stop all creative pursuits. My mother passed away 3 years ago last spring and I was in the middle of recording new material for a music project. I basically full-stopped and didn't touch it again until about a month ago and finally got back on track and finished it. I went through a similar few year hiatus in 2006 when I got divorced.

Anyway, it's nice to have a little better insight into this stuff even if I don't agree with the article, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Here's a link to the single if anyone is curious about it:

https://n-o-w-h-e-r-e.bandcamp.com

https://soundcloud.com/n_o_w_h_e_r_e/sets/the-traveller

[taurath]

Creativity does spawn from constrained environments, as any game developer can tell you. Most of the beauty in hacks or interesting ways of getting around things is the context of limited resources.

I think people who are consistently creative can frequently either find an environment that constrains them (a writer taking a retreat to the woods, for instance), or tackles problems with existing constraints.

If everything in your life is going well and there's not boredom, there's not a whole lot of purpose to creativity - you are however free to create constrained environments. Burning man for instance creates a lot of opportunity for creativity because its out in the desert, temporary, and must be packed up or burned afterwards. Same with living out in the country with few social connections. Its easy however to just get dragged down by depression or just the dreariness of boredom when living out in the country for me at least - there's a reason a lot of people turn to drugs in rural areas (in the US at least).

[epa]

Can you expand that argument to work life - as in creative people may be better at dealing with situations such as startups where a constrained environment is often time and money. Are there trends that successful founders often had prior creative outlets in their childhood more often than not?

[taurath]

The general trend that I've seen is that founders in general (successful and not) is that they have a propensity for risk thats out of line with the general population - frequently (in my anecdotal experience) stemming from a strong sense of security and exposure to possibilities from a wealthy upbringing.

[junko]

Ah but my mind is very good at stripping down artificially constrained environments - just artificial. The lazy part of me will always seek for the comfort zone.

That's another wild horse to get in control of I guess.

[muddyrivers]

Depression and sadness are very different emotional states, especially when we are talking about clinical depression.

[abc_lisper]

This jibes with my experience. When I was feeling down because of financial reasons, it became even harder to solve problems, and interviews. Catch-22.

A couple of years later, I was much more fluent.

[okreallywtf]

I work more like you than as described in the article; when I'm depressed, I tend to get worse at everything other than focusing on the thing or things that seem to be causing the depression.

[sixo]

I feel more creative after depressed periods, not during. The depressed period seems to provide me with a lot of like, empathic vocabulary to draw on afterwards.

[k__]

To me sadness is seeing black, while depression is being blind.

When I'm sad, I want to work with that feeling.

When I'm depressed, I can't interact.