I sat by the window, listening to raindrops pattering against the windowpane, reading Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’. After reading a few pages, I put down the book and sank into gloom. My mind started to ponder about the spiraling depression that had trapped Esther (the protagonist) and how she was unable to escape. The book becomes even more unsettling when the readers see it as a portrayal of Plath’s own life.

From Sylvia Plath to Vincent Van Gogh, the never-ending list of artists who suffered from depression and other mental ailments has given rise to the trope of ‘tortured genius’ and a popular notion that mental illness enhances an artists’ ability to create magnificent art and that it acts as some sort of motivation for them. The fallacy of this idea needs to be addressed on several levels. When I contemplate it, Edvard Munch’s words strike my mind. The artist who painted one of the masterpieces, The Scream, had said, “Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder… I cannot get rid of my illnesses, for there is a lot in my art that exists only because of them... They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art.” Munch’s words unveil the gravity of this problem. They indicate how intertwining mental illness and art is, and how it conditions artists and other creatives to believe that they must keep enduring the agony to create better art and consequently dissuades them from seeking help.

Art therapy can surely play a significant role in improving people’s mental health, but the romanticization of mental illness as a creative force tends to disregard these creatives’ years of constant struggle to come out of the labyrinth of suffering. The consequences of mental illness, more often than not, go unnoticed when we glorify it. We fail to see how most of them succumbed to it. This practice thus exacerbates the already existing ignorance and lack of awareness about what mental illness actually is and how it can affect a person and certainly impede their progress. As Van Gogh himself wrote in one of his letters, “Oh, if I could have worked without this accursed disease – what things I might have done.”

We must let go of the idea of ‘tortured genius’. While we are working towards destigmatizing mental illness, romanticizing is not helping, but delaying it.