[delichon]

> [Holmes] battles with drug addiction, loneliness and depression. His genius thrives in part because of these vulnerabilities, not despite them.

If there was a pill for that, how many masterpieces like the Sherlock Holmes books would never be made? The products of misery have always been the devil's advocate's best arguments. If Doyle had not sympathized with Holmes' afflictions, he could not have written him. Or if he had written Holmes as a Mary Sue we wouldn't have cared. (Though for some reason it worked for Harry Potter.)

An effective education requires a certain amount of torture, and it works better when self inflicted.

[joshcsimmons]

This is 100% not true.

> An effective education requires a certain amount of torture, and it works better when self inflicted.

It's the tortured artist myth. You can turn pain into art but it's not a prerequisite.

[Kostchei]

Yeh, I agree with this. My art (painting and building) comes at a much faster rate when I am content. Having time and metal space to contemplate colour scheme, being confident to start something bold: that doesn't happen if I am tired, preoccupied or depressed

[joshcsimmons]

Time for harvest and a separate time for planting.

[paxys]

Quite the opposite in fact. Throughout history the most successful artists have been the well funded ones.

[delichon]

The most miserable people I've known were rich people's children. Depression is more about the lack of hope than money.

[paxys]

You probably don't know very many poor people then, because poverty, food insecurity, physical insecurity, homelessness, job loss are all very common depression triggers. It's just that these cases don't make the front page of newspapers at the same rate as celebrities committing suicide.

[delichon]

The ones I knew weren't celebrities, they were friendless and isolated and consumed with self disgust.

Poor people trapped in unemployment have something in common with rich kids trapped in lethargy. A kind of spiritual constipation.

[michaelscott]

No, more like literal survival. In these conditions there is no mental bandwidth for things like spiritual constipation

[krapp]

When you're poor in a capitalist society, money is hope.

[delichon]

Exactly. You can hope for money. But if you have money and no hope, you're fucked.

[krapp]

I disagree. If you have money and no hope, you still have access to opportunities that poor people don't have. Hopelessness is a choice in that case.

[delichon]

Over-emphasized maybe, but myth? Could Doyle have written a sympathetic lonely depressed addict so well without more than academic understanding of those things?

[sudosteph]

He was a physician and had said that his experience treating patients influenced his characters. So, he had more than academic experience, but I'm not sure if it's enough to prove he experienced those things personally.

[chuckadams]

For every tortured genius whose passion comes from pain, there's a hundred who never get started because they lack the energy to get out of bed half the time, are slowly killing themselves with alcohol and other substances, and so on. But a pill alone doesn't fix that -- hell, current research shows most of those pills do no better than a placebo -- so the mythology of the nobility of suffering will continue for some time hence.

(Fun fact, you know that "lorem ipsum" text that's used as filler? It's not nonsense Latin, it's from a speech by Cicero where he denounces the stoic ideal of suffering being good for the soul, or at least "pointless" suffering anyway)

[delichon]

> or at least "pointless" suffering anyway

What bulletproof word choice. Robert Harris called Cicero the first modern politician, and that looks right.

[ongy]

Do you have a link to research pointing at antidepressants being no better than placebo?