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Supple, I agree with what you're saying. But I think it is useful to separate out several meanings of what we're trying to get at with "cause and effect" which can be extremely complicated.
For example, the grief I felt was very motivating. It had to be dealt with somehow. I don't know how other people generally deal with it, but I couldn't just sit down and feel the agony. The agony, if it makes sense, "demanded" that I do something. Yes, all the other ingredients were already there, as you point out. But the agony sort of lit them on fire. I don't know how to really explain it.
So I agree that the depression didn't "cause" the creativity, in the sense that it was "sufficient" (no way was it sufficient, that would be ridiculous). But it may have been "necessary" in a sort of probabilistic sense, in that without it, all those ingredients would still have been sitting there (most likely), and wouldn't have been assembled into musical pieces.
So something can be a "motivating factor" even though that same something, at the same time, is very debilitating. And it was debilitating. Without the agony, I might have been able to be more creative, but the emotional, motivating, overwhelming need to express my very strong feelings, might simply not existed, so the end result may have been nothing at all.
This is a complex subject because it is difficult if not impossible to eliminate one thing from the "causal network" without eliminating a lot of other things.
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