Two of the 30 committed suicide during the 15 years of the study. The study is small but the relatively high rates of alcoholism and depression buttress the folk wisdom that creative artists are mad, with alcoholism an inevitable part of that insanity. Freudian psychology has held that creativity is a sublimation of aggressive and sexual impulses or a response to emotional pain. A domineering, cold mother or any kind of unhappy childhood, according to this view, causes neurosis and anxiety, and neurosis is a veritable hotbed, or incubator, for creativity. Proponents of this theory point out that those same anxieties would cause alcoholism in writers and other artists.
Writers do behave oddly.
They can be monomaniacal about their work, obsessional about rewriting, insecure about any success they might have, paranoid about editors and publishers, riddled with anxiety about their talent. They are often nonconformists. Ronald R. Fieve, in his 1975 book Moodswings, concedes that creative individuals tend to be eccentric and erratic, but he does not agree with the general Freudian idea that creativity is simply a response to emotional pain. I would conclude that individuals are creative despite their disorders, but certainly not because of them. In 1904, Havelock Ellis, who wrote copiously about psychology and sex around the turn of the century, did a study of 1,030 geniuses in England's history and found that only 4.2 percent of them were crazy.