Mental Illness is Not Correlated with Genius

What madness may have to do with creativity and genius has continued to intrigue down to this day, with scholars arguing for and against the association, its benefits and its deficits. In 1995, in a large scale and statistically convincing study of 1,004 eminent individuals of the 20th century, psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig argued that no necessary or sufficient correlation, hence no causal connection, between mental illness and creative achievement was to be found. Individuals in artistic profe...

 Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)

The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart diseas...

 Cognitive Benefits of Bilingualism

In stark contrast to early suspicions that bilingual children were at risk of retardation or at best, “mentally confused” (Bialystok, 2005), recent research links bilingualism to cognitive reserve and suggests it may offer protection against dementia in old age. Cognitive reserve describes a kind of resilience which appears to mediate the relationship between brain pathology and the clinical expression of that pathology; it is thought that this resilience derives from more efficient use o...

 Happiness as a Psychiatric Disorder

It is perhaps premature to attempt an exact definition of happiness. However, despite the fact that formal diagnostic criteria have yet to be agreed, it seems likely that happiness has affective, cognitive and behavioural components. Thus, happiness is usually characterised by a positive mood, sometimes described as 'elation' or 'joy', although this may be relatively absent in the milder happy states, sometimes termed 'contentment'. Argyle, in his review of the relevant empirical literature, ...