is creativity a stepping stone to addiction

Is Creativity a Stepping Stone to Addiction?

The notion that drug use fuels innovation has been around for decades. And it's easy to see why.

★ Images of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger and River Phoenix -- all brilliantly creative and all dead at a young age due to a drug overdose -- come to mind.

★ Winehouse, whose manager urged her to partake in intensive outpatient treatment (IOP) for women, refused and instead wound up with a best-selling single based on the experience.

★ So why is it that every time another celebrity adds their name to the list, the question is posed: Did drugs or alcohol help usher in the creative process?

★ Would Stephen King, for instance, be such a great writer if he wasn't such a prodigious cocaine user? As writer F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

★ But where does the addiction take you? All too often, it leads to a tragic end, as evidenced by the pantheon of hugely popular artists whose careers and lives were cut short due to drugs and alcohol.

★ While some creative types participate in IOP drug treatment for women or men, others continue to struggle with untreated addiction throughout their lives.

★ Addiction is a disease, not a cheery path to success. We only need turn to science for confirmation. When questioned by Scientific American whether there is a link between creativity and addiction, neuroscientist David Linden of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine succinctly responded, "No." To make other conclusions is to blur the line between coincidence and cause.

★ That said, might there be a predisposition toward drug and alcohol use in people who are creative?

★ Additionally, might creative people be more likely to refuse IOP treatment for women and men? Possibly. As Aristotle once declared,

★ "Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry and the arts have all had tendencies towards melancholia." And melancholia, as medicine proves, has a strong correlation with addiction.[Inserted: IOP]

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