There is a grain of truth to this but I think this article implies causation when it's merely a correlation.
My own view is that some people are acutely sensitive to everything that happens around them. Even minor things like unexpected rain on the way to work can turn into an epiphany or a minor tragedy depending on your mood. You're constantly ruminating and over analyzing everything and so its possible that you're good at translating feelings into words.
It gels with my personal experience.
Even a correlation is very interesting!
In fact I tend to disagree, I don't think anyone is proposing that the causation must be direct, because there are still intelligent people who are not bipolar or depressive and there are bipolar and depressed people who are not intelligent. But the correlation, which I think everybody assuming is some third factor behind the mental illness and intelligence/creativity, is still interesting.
... of course, it's an interesting correlation in a sea of interesting correlations, and it's hard to tell which of them are genuinely interesting and which are just "throw enough variables together and you'll get all sorts of spurious correlations". But I'd submit that this is an unusally strong signal, as evidenced by the fact that humans have been making this observation for centuries now. Even if it is spurious, I suspect the proof of that would itself have something interesting in it.
Therefore I'll keep it short.
I'm cyclothymic (like mild bipolar), anxious far more often than not, and creating is the only thing which does anything for me, and even then, it doesn't do much.
I have the fortune of knowing a fair bit about my neurochemistry, having sequenced my genome and spent more time than is healthy in SNPedia, and my dopamine and serotonin systems are all kinds of screwed - low output, low uptake. My oxycontin system is amped up to the point that I should be schizophrenic. Perhaps I am.
Either way, the upshot is that I'm always empty. Always worthless. Always feeling like I haven't achieved a damned thing - and this drives me to be better, to create, to make, be that code, music, art, making random crap out of junk, or reading something, learning, aiming to have more knowledge that I can do things with.
Finally, from an objective standpoint, I have an IQ that caused my school to make me re-sit the IQ test with two people watching me, and still believe I had somehow cheated, and am diagnosed with cyclothymia. I choose to be unmedicated, as I'd far rather be sad and mad and have a drive to create and do, than be a happy docile blob.
How did you learn so much about your neurochemistry, especially your neurotransmitter levels? Any past experiences with medication?
And how do you deal with creative downtime, or relaxing?
Medication - yeah, tried a variety in my early 20's, hated side effects, ended up anxious over not being anxious.
Downtime and forced relaxation - weed. Only way I can make myself sit still.
Careful with statements like that. I've pondered quite a bit about this. Of course I too would like to think that such suffering isn't entirely pointless. But mental illness can be so incredibly devastating, no amount of gained wisdom will compensate for that. Especially if self-harm or suicide is involved, it's even harder to see any potential upsides.
In a similar line of thinking, there's a book called "A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness" that was a fascinating read. The gist of the book is that our best leaders' mental illnesses had something to do with them being great. Abraham Lincoln for example, suffered from depression. This fact may have given him special insight into the suffering of others -- a kind of empathy. This empathy was invaluable, says the author, to the decisions he made.
Anyway, yeah. I like this idea. Maybe suffering from mental illness isn't ALL bad. Maybe it has some valuable upsides.