raveneye

For myself, the question is whether the connection is real or valid in the population as a whole. In other words, is it true that e.g. bipolar disorder is associated with (on average) higher creativity? If it is true (and several studies have shown it to be true), then I would say it "is a good idea" to make that connection in our minds. Simply because it's true.

If a depressed (or bipolar) individual is cured, then I would say that necessarily that person's mode of creative expression will be changed. That's unavoidable; we can't make a major change in one aspect of our lives without changing most other aspects. Whether that change is good or bad, or desirable or not, I would say is for that person him/herself to decide. And I would say the kind of treatment that the person should pursue is ultimately up to that person.

(Putting bipolar disorder aside for now) I believe that depression per se is an adaptive response in humans to certain kinds of stressful situations. It's hard to say what precisely its benefit was in the past, but its function was certainly not to increase artistic creativity as we might define that in the present (although that might be an occasional side effect in some people).

So if depression were somehow eliminated, its adaptive benefits would be eliminated as well. To me, the main benefit is the motivation to alleviate the psychological pain, preferably by changing one's life in ways that reduce the initial stressors that caused the depression in the first place. I think the loss of that benefit is the only serious consideration. So to answer the question: our humanity would certainly be different; and we would be less functional in some ways.

You could generalize the question by asking: if we could eliminate all pain, would we be less human? That would be a much more extreme loss of functionality, so extreme that very few people would survive it.

If the currently accepted explanation for the correlation between bipolar disorder and creativity is true, then eliminating BP per se will have very little if any effect on overall creativity. That's because the cause of the higher creativity is not BP per se, it's the joint cause of both BP and the higher creativity. However, it may not be possible to eliminate BP separately from its precursor cause.

I don't know of any demonstrated correlation of creativity with depression per se in the general population, but again, it is very difficult to change just one thing in such a complex web of interactions as the human psyche.

Well yes, but it misses my point. In my personal experience, motivation to eat, sleep, and have sex were all about zero. But I was highly motivated to do other things, which ultimately caused the pain to subside. One of those things was to write music in a way that I had never done before. I'm not saying that all people are like me, just providing an example.

And again, that was the only time in my life that I would have ascribed a relationship between "mood" and creativity. As I said, the vast majority of the time there has never been any noticeable relationship.