I take medication for bipolar disorder, among other things. I take medication, as well as go to therapy, to help manage my moods and make my life easier. But there is stigma against it, especially among creators, because of the mistaken belief that medication kills creativity. And I’m here to address that.
There is a pervasive belief that taking mental health medication negatively affects creativity. And I will admit that it can be harder to find inspiration to make art when you first start out. But being unmedicated doesn’t automatically take away creativity. When I started taking medication for bipolar disorder, it was a hard adjustment. The medication they needed to prescribe me left me feeling sedated and sluggish, and I found I lacked the drive to do many things, not just write. That’s a lot of why I don’t take any of those anymore, though it wasn’t the only side effect I struggled with. The high levels of sedation made it impossible to get anything done, not just writing. That was something that took a long time to sort out, trying different medications until I found ones that worked better.
Once I was on a better track, my mental health team started suggesting that maybe some form of PTSD was at play as well. That was much harder to medicate, however. What I needed at that point was therapy. I had spent ages getting nowhere fast in therapy until I got my medication sorted out. It was only once my medication was sorted that I started to get any sort of benefit from therapy. But I still struggled to tap into anything creative because I had never flexed my creative muscles while medicated and stable though.
The biggest breakthrough was realizing my issue wasn’t lack of creativity. I was plenty creative when I put my mind to it, after all. My problem was I lacked a routine. You see, waiting for inspiration is a guarantee that you won’t get anything done, and that’s a lot of what I relied on pre-medication days. That was part of why my first book took so long to write. I kept waiting for inspiration, and I consistently didn’t find it. It was only once I established a routine and started forcing myself to write regularly that I found my missing creativity. See, it takes that initial spark of an idea, but you need more than a spark. You need to make the time to work on it, whatever stage of the project you’re on. This is not unique to people who are mentally ill. Anyone who is waiting for inspiration is going to get nowhere fast.
If anything, taking medication and learning how to be creative with it on board is only going to improve the quality of your work. Think about how much easier it is to get things done when you’re in a better spot mentally. When you’re not depressed, anxious, or manic, you’re not fighting your brain to do things like go to work, or school, pay the bills, or do chores right? It’s the same with creative endeavors. It’s easier to get the work done if you’re not fighting with your own brain on what you want to focus on. Less executive dysfunction, less anxiety over whether it will come out the way you want, less second guessing every single decision you make. Plus, it makes it easier to set and stick to a routine. Routines were next to impossible before I started taking medication, but that coupled with a healthy set of coping skills have made it easier to get things done in a consistent manner.
That’s not to say I still don’t have bad days. I have plenty of bad days, for a variety of reasons. That’s when I give myself the grace to take time off when I need it, because I know the work will be there when I’m feeling better. Because I have consistently stuck to a schedule of sorts for so long, I’ll have few problems picking it back up. Because while sometimes you can push through the bad feelings, sometimes you can’t. I know after many years of trying and failing that if I’m manic, the art won’t be good. My writing will be chaotic and disjointed, with ideas that lead nowhere and sentences I can only describe as the literary equivalent to M.C. Escher in structure and clarity. The ideas themselves will be grandiose and unusable once I come down, and I’ve spent my share of hours fixing things I thought were brilliant while in the throes of mania or even having to discard them completely.
Another problem is, if you’re struggling with your mental health, it can magnify perceived problems exponentially. The more you think It’s a problem, the more stressed, anxious, and depressed you can get, creating a feedback loop. Maybe it is a problem, but it’s one that is far easier to solve when you’ve got a way to deal with the feelings, and not in the middle of an episode. Mental illness often lies to us, says that people will hate our work or that it is too flawed to keep working on. I know I’ve lost my share of projects to that lie over and over.
Writing is hard. But unchecked mental illness makes it so much harder to get done. I know that in many places medication and therapy aren’t options for everyone. But if you have access, maybe see if it will help. It won’t work right away, of course, but putting your mental health first helps in all areas, not just with creative pursuits. And when you’re not fighting your own brain on every task you have to do, it actually makes it easier to get those words done. And isn’t that alone worth it?