Going to the van Gogh question, how do Prozac, and depression itself, affect creativity and creative output?
I don’t think anyone has the definitive answer to this, except to say that from the outset it looks as if the connection between depression and creativity is exaggerated in people’s minds. There’s a long history — a 2,000-year-old history — of people associating melancholy with creativity. But a lot of what was meant by “melancholy” was other ailments, like epilepsy and manic-depressive illness. Arguably, there’s a better connection when you look at studies between (those illnesses) and creativity than when you look at depression and creativity. So I think it’s part of a long history of being wrong, and a tendency to romanticize something that was hard to treat. The illness doesn’t seem to do anybody any good. Let’s talk about the mechanics of depression. Now that everyone “knows” it’s the fault of low serotonin, you say that turns out to be wrong. The older theories had to do with transmitters like serotonin. The newer theories have to do with stress hormones and the effects of stre