Why do the best literary minds kill themselves/suffer from mental illness and depression?

in which decade did people realize Hemingway wasnt a great writer?

because life gets boring

Probably because the root of those neuroses were also the root of a great need for self-expression. Intelligence, obviously, but also empathy and self-awareness/self-consciousness.

All of these people suffered from depression and anxiety, severe can be easily argued. The twin being mental illness.

Except they do. It's arguable enough to be a constantly heated debate within psychology if mental illness can otherwise cause great creative minds. Emotional people who focus on deep wells of emotion just as a savant focuses on mathematics.

This is because, in this specific scenario, the mind has less trouble shifting through different ideas and emotions. That we're deeply emotional creatures already, and our minds grow through emotional activity. Having the ability to easily go from point A to B to C, while also being more easy to emotional extremes, and living your life being used to this, given the career opportunity of writing. Can either create total ineptitude and self destruction, or it could create a brilliant author.

Almost all of Hemingway's works are classics. They are all fantastic in their writing and the way they grab you into the story. His influence with ice berg style is incredible. How is he not great?

Beauty is derived from pain and vice versa. The work of an artist is their pain manifest. The artist projects their pain outwards in an attempt at catharsis. Sometimes they succeed, reach a truth, and come to terms with their pain. Sometimes they chase their instincts in search of that catharsis that never comes and tumble down a spiral staircase that ends with death.

Arno didn't off himself

This.
I always theorize that any art or form of self expression comes, deeply, from a fracture between one self and his life. You are not wholeheartedly comfortable with reality so you try to close the gap by creating something which is real (a book, a movie, a painting) but embodies the ideal (what's missing to make everything right).
Sometime that's not cathartic enough so you end up suicidal

I hadn't read your point, but that's basically it

Suicide. Preuve de lâcheté.

A factor but not quite the root of the reason

Most people suffer from depression at different points in their lives, some people are just more able and willing to articulate it.

As for mental illness, the fat lady with wrinkly tattoos and a chainsmoker's voice is more likely to suffer from some serious mental illness than any writer. When you're in the loony bin it's mostly poor people.

Some of the greatest writers were perfectly mentally healthy.

I don't deny that there is some sort of connection. Anecdotally I can say that families with lots of artists/musicians/writers also often have some amount of serious mental illness in there. But it's stupid to fetishize or romanticize it.

There isn't one, because nobody doesn't suffer from mental illness and depression under the vague as shit definitions they're going to be given in this thread.

Life sucks. Most people are unhappy at least some of the time. We just have handy clincal terms for it now, which let us pretend we can take a pill or go to a summer camp that'll help. It won't. We're rotting meat.

>Life sucks. Most people are unhappy at least some of the time. We just have handy clincal terms for it now, which let us pretend we can take a pill or go to a summer camp that'll help. It won't. We're rotting meat.

That's actually not how brain chemistry works you fucking idiot. This is the psuediest shit and I keep seeing it repeated.

Things can in fact, change your personality. Your brain is not a solid concrete piece of matter that just helps you be like you. Hit your head enough times as a child, and you lose the ability to feel empathy from the traumatic impacts to the prefrontal cortex.

I believe this is what happened to you and anyone who thinks this shit is really just as simple as everyone being sensitive today. Not that medical science is giving you what you don't need.

But if you honestly believe this along with every other pretentious ill read fuck please continue.

I don't doubt the existence of actual, clinical mental illness or the reality of neruology, read my post dumbshit. What happens is every time anybody is nervous or melancholy, or was, it gets clinicalized into anxiety and depression. These discussions about writers always broaden the clinical definitions to the point where everybody falls into them so they can congratulate themselves about feeling like garbage or feel smart for identifying some sociological fact or whatever. People do it IRL so they can feel relief from their simple, common woes.

>What happens is every time anybody is nervous or melancholy, or was, it gets clinicalized into anxiety and depression

You have to have a long period of either, usually in childhood, to be diagnosed with clinical depression. Years of it to see that it's a problem. Caused for an innumerable amount of reasons. Depression is not a social issue it is purely a medical one.

But I'm sure it's just those fuckin coddled millennials again and not actual medicine telling you otherwise.

There is actually a scientific basis for it. The minds that tend to be introverted assimilate knowledge and learning in such a way that lends itself to artistic achievement.

Often times the being extremely ambitious, unique, imaginative, and hardworking necessarily precludes sociability as well as includes extreme self-judgement.

bullshit. Art is expression of emotion and your inner self. It can be pain,anger or sometimes even happiness. The last very rare in picasso etc maybe, but it isnt, in no way, only pain. If it was like that, we would have very onesided art.

If I cut myself will my write gud?

Sorry bud we're not interested in critical thinking and legitimate discussion on this board. Only shit posts and memes.

that qt3.14 looks pretty happy

Ah i see well in that case finnegans wake is totally Joyce's best work.

It seems to me that people focus more upon the eccentric minority than an actual majority. For every depressive Tchaikovsky we have ten industrious Bachs, for every Van Gogh we have ten Rodins and for ever Hemingway we have ten Manns.

The pursuit of the creation of art is near necessarily the work of introverts, highly sensitive with a massive capacity of solitude. And these same qualities do tend to be similar to those who suffer from a variety of mental maladies but these do not constitute a majority. Perhaps higher than in the average population but not even close to parity. They are just cases prone to romanticisation.

>unironically quoting the "Dictionnaire des idées reçues"

>best literary minds
>ErnestHemingway.jpg

Joyce had one fart to the face too many

Is it considered cool to hate on hemingway or something? Dudes writing is so good in a won a noble prize, what more do you want?

>mentally ill writer thread
>nobody ever mentions Joseph Conrad

>He... suffer[ed] from severe headaches and nervous attacks...
>In the words of his uncle Bobrowski, as a young man Conrad was "extremely sensitive, conceited, reserved, and in addition excitable.
>Conrad had a phobia of dentistry, neglecting his teeth until they had to be extracted. In one letter he remarked that every novel he had written had cost him a tooth.
>20-year-old Conrad attempted suicide, by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver.

Psued

Hemmingway suffered from a genetic condition where his liver was unable to remove iron from his body properly. The iron slowly deposited itself in his brain as he slowly went insane.

He killed himself as a result of demencia from his disease, not because he was depressed or had any sort of philosophical reason to.

>Hemmigway.
Sorry for the typo. I forgot the two extra m's.
>Hemmmmingway.

"Insane" is a bit of an extreme way to put it. He wasn't "insane". He had bipolar disorder, if I'm remembering things correctly. It's easy to argue bipolar disorder naturally influences creative people to become obsessed creatively.

I feel that most depressed writers write to create a world that's better than their's. Or to share the pain that they feel.

When a writer kills themselves, they discard their own work in the trash along with their cadaver. Why bother with ideas that lead a person to the grave? Have fun with Hamingway

>Why bother with ideas that lead a person to the grave?

Why not?

You probably aren't a happy person.

The best literary mind is Shakespeare.

You say that like its natural I should be

It's not that hard really

Pity Shakespeare didn't actually write any of his works

Because if you are insightful enough yu wil realize that life affirmation is not the absolute good and you can really fuck up your life by helplessly clinging to it at all costs. Football season is over motherfuckers

I think slavs have some genetic predisposition to be depressed.

Lol what?

football season just started

oh is it opposites day?

hes saying op was looking for affirmation, implying op was depressed and that he was looking for people to tell him smart people get depressed

but it helps

Joyce was a schizophrenic though.

citation needed

Wow such a deep question.

Daily reminder that Shakespeare was the boring person with the most boring life in the whole of English history, and that this can be used to counter any shitty "lol neurotypicals can't write" memers.

hemingway was a melodramatic fool desu. most writers are.
writers talk a lot in their heads, assign meaning to things that aren't there or overblow the meanings of said things.
mental illness is literally the result of talking too much to yourself.

They don't. But some do, so I'll try to explain. You see, they were too autistic for society and anti-depressants didn't exist yet.

but shakespeare sucked. get with the times gramps, the future is now

Our perception of the world condemns us to perpetual suffering. Ignorance is indeed bliss.

>ice berg style