The Inner Manic

What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are also the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people, write. We write to escape our prisons. - Alice W. Flaherty

In the first chapter of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain, Flaherty draws the connection between mental illness and writing. She notes that studies have shown that "writers are ten times more likely to be manic-depressive than the rest of the population, and poets are a remarkable forty times more likely. Even student poets not diagnosed with mental illness have more manic traits than students who do not write poetry."

Importantly, Flaherty makes the distinction between these writers and those who write for outer gain, for recognition, for money, for success. Writers with mental illness write for themselves, to release what is within, to feel that they are being productive, or simply because they must. Isn't this why we should all be writing?

This, of course, does not mean that we need to have a mental illness in order to write. But reading this makes me want to look inside a little bit and search for signs of my inner manic.