Spalding Gray’s disappearance and the suspicions that he has suicided prompt a reexamination of the notion of the tormented artist. Are writers more prone to depression, or do we just hear about it? “No one ever hears about melancholic farmers; they don’t publish their stories.” Are tormented souls more likely to become artists? In the celebrated study of the issue, venerable psychiatrist Nancy Andreason found that mood disorders were far more prevalent among Iowa Writers’ Workshop participants than the general public. The direction of the causal link, however, remains puzzling despite being pondered at length by mental health experts. Ny own perspective is that both mood disorders (mania and depression) and thought disorders (schizophrenia and other psychoses) decrease rather than stimulate functionality and output in most sufferers, at least the ones I treat. Art by tortured souls is likely to be despite rather than due to their torment and represents the triumph of their other gifts over their suffering. Creative output may be a a strategy to bind and cope with distress in some instances… or in most, which is why the cost-cutting measure I see in most systems of mental health care delivery of eliminating art therapy as a treatment modality is so painful to watch. Not only may the artist have a transformative relationship to her distress but to her culture, that she is in a sense of but not in — making a metastatement on cultural and social norms, morés and suppositions. Mental illness too can be considered from the standpoint not of intrapsychic but sociocultural alienation and distress, so that the relationship between creativity and madness must be considered from that sphere as well. Is societal alienation and disengagement from cultural norms a cause or a consequence of mental illness? Another thing often debated without a simple answer… I also think it is naive to speak generically of ‘creativity’ as if there were only one kind. Psychological studies of intelligence have veered off from the classical notion of a unitary intelligence to the idea of a multiplicity of discrete intellectual (and emotional) skills. Similarly, I think, with creative abilities. Different forms of creativity will, almost inevitably, have differing relationships with psychological torment and cultural alienation. Addendum: John Perry Barlow, a friend of Spalding Gray, contemplates the likelihood he is gone.