Do You Have to Suffer to Be Creative?
Personal Perspective: Artists should not have to live in misery for art’s sake.
Posted June 1, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
The other night I started watching a documentary about Leonard Cohen, the poet/philosopher/musician who wrote the beloved song, “Hallelujah.” Given its haunting melody and poignant, stirring lyrics, many consider “Hallelujah” to be the inspirational anthem of our times. According to the documentary, it took Cohen seven years to write—seven years of constant revision, rethinking, rediscovering. But he emerged from this torturous process with a thing of great beauty.
You’d think he would have been overjoyed to have created something so special that has moved so many people. But no; the face that stared back at me from the television screen was deeply etched with sorrow. I only saw him smile a few times throughout the whole documentary, and even then, the smile seemed to be cracking through a mask of pain. I finally had to stop watching—not because I didn’t enjoy learning about Cohen’s impressive body of work, but because I couldn’t help but wonder: Was he so gifted because of that pain?
I took that question to bed with me and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Must an artist suffer to make great art? Are mental stability and happiness death to creativity ?
The reason the question is haunting me is because I’m a writer with bipolar disorder who’s mined my own life for my work. A lot of that life has been shot through with darkness, so my writing has necessarily been bleak at times. But since writing my last book, my mental health has significantly improved. I’m sober, I’m stable, I’m relatively serene; I’m certainly more at peace than I’ve ever been before. Does that mean my best writing days are over?
It’s a common belief that artists are tortured souls with terrible life stories of drink or debauchery or untimely death, or all three. There’s also an undeniable link between artistry and mental illness—e.g., studies have repeatedly shown that many people with bipolar disorder possess an unusually high degree of artistic talent. But do you really have to suffer or be unstable to create good work?
I remember reading Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir, An Unquiet Mind , in which she worried that lithium would take her manic spells away and thereby tamp down her ability to write. I was on lithium at that time, too, and I understood her fear . Like so many people with bipolar illness, when I’m manic, I’m unstoppably creative. I have an almost fanatical urge then to express myself—by talking, singing, writing, and any other means of self-disclosure.
Unfortunately, though I’d feverishly scribble until my fingers gave out, it yielded little of any worth. When I came back down from my mania and reviewed what I had done, I was always dismayed. I could barely decipher my tiny, crabbed script or make any sense out of the brilliant but fantastical stream of consciousness I’d tried to capture. It was nonsense, and I’d have to throw it away.
The first rule of writing is to respect the reader—and I was doing potential readers no favors by foisting my madness upon them. Good writing isn’t about wild flights of fancy that no one else can follow (and yes, that includes poetry). Good writing is about holding a mirror to human nature, and that’s a monumental task. It takes clarity, focus, and perspective. It takes sharp eyes and a keen mind, not one that is distorted by illness.
Maybe one does have to go through hard times at some point to have compelling material to write about. But actually turning those hard times into art, producing work that can translate to an audience, requires discipline and clear comprehension. A mind befuddled by drugs or drink or intolerable pain will just create befuddled work.
I think the artist-in-purgatory myth has been propagated far too long, dissuading people who may want to write or be creative but don’t feel their lives have been sufficiently troubled. That’s a great loss because the act of creation can be a source of great pleasure and personal growth. So why not write from joy, as well? In the personal essay class I teach, I always tell my students not to wrap their stories up with a bow, because life doesn’t usually work that way. But you know what? Sometimes it does, and I think that story is worth telling, too.
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Terri Cheney is the author of Manic: A Memoir and The Dark Side of Innocence: Growing Up Bipolar .
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.