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How traits like creativity, drive, and resilience can become assets when managing bipolar disorder symptoms.
Key Takeaways
- Traits like creativity, drive, and empathy can be real strengths, especially when your mood is stable.
- Pay attention if your thoughts start feeling too intense and stay with your treatment plan to help protect your stability.
- Faith, community, and creative outlets can help you stay grounded and build resilience over time.
- If your energy or mood ever starts feeling chaotic or risky, reach out to a healthcare professional right away.
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Living with bipolar disorder can be deeply disruptive and difficult. At the same time, some people say that during stable periods, certain traits linked to the condition — such as creativity, intensity, or drive — can also feel meaningful or useful. That does not erase the real risks. Rather, it reflects the complexity of living with bipolar and seeing yourself as more than a diagnosis.
In the two decades since she was diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder, musician Sara L. has developed some ideas about what might be called the “upside” of the condition.
“This is just my own kind of pet theory,” explains Sara, “that it confers personality characteristics … drive, ambition, energy, enthusiasm, and self-confidence. And when you’re well, those things come across in a positive, pro-social way.”
Of course, Sara knows all about the “life-trashing” side of bipolar. As a punk rocker with dark moods, she spent her twenties overindulging in alcohol and marijuana. When she rebounded from a deep depression into extreme mania after a romantic breakup, symptoms like religious delusions, incoherent speech, and agitation landed her in the hospital.
With medication to smooth out her mood swings and talk therapy to defuse the distorted thinking of depression, she’s able to see some pluses to living with bipolar.
Creativity and Drive as Bipolar Strengths
“Research has shown that there are links between creativity and bipolar disorder,” explains Sara, who pursued a master of counseling psychology. “I think it remains to be seen exactly if or how, but in my own life, I’ve always been a creative spirit. Or maybe not so much that bipolar causes a creative mind — it may, but it’s more that it gives you drive and ambition.”
That combination of creativity and drive helped Sara make her mark as a singer-songwriter, recording and touring with her indie-pop band. She still performs with her band and other musicians occasionally, but facing off against bipolar has given her a new passion: helping other people with this brain-based condition.
She’s developed the view that it’s a “belief about having bipolar disorder that really can make or break our ability to live well. I think when people get the message that, ‘Oh, this is a chronic illness and you better just hunker down and try to get through life, and you’re going to be very limited in what you can do’ — people internalize that message,” she says.
“I think it’s still a day-to-day struggle, with everyone who has bipolar, because of the moods … so it takes vigilance, and it does take resilience,” Sara adds. “And I guess part of that is acknowledging the positive things it’s brought to you.”
Can Bipolar Traits Ever Feel Positive?
While it may sound surprising to put “bipolar” and “positive” in the same sentence, a study published in Molecular Neuropsychiatry found that people with bipolar disorder possess personality traits, including drive and motivation, ideational originality, and cognitive flexibility.
Nassir Ghaemi, MD, MPH, a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, went a step further in his 2012 book A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links between Leadership and Mental Illness. The widely publicized book argues that because leaders with depression or bipolar disorder have stronger qualities of empathy, realism, creativity, and resilience, they’re better equipped for times of crisis.
“Depression enhances empathy and realism, and the mania enhances creativity and resilience … so when people have bipolar disorder, they have the full gamut of benefits,” says Dr. Ghaemi.
Differentiating Stable Strengths From Active Symptoms
It’s vital to distinguish between manageable strengths and the symptoms of an active mood episode. For instance, the “drive” felt during stability is a focused, productive ambition, whereas the “driven” feeling of mania often becomes scattered, risky, or harmful. Maintaining credibility with your treatment team means recognizing when a “strength” is actually a sign that your mood is tipping toward dysfunction.
True resilience is built during stable periods, using the insights gained from past challenges to fuel growth without romanticizing the danger of untreated mania.
In his book, Ghaemi notes that his thesis upends the commonly held assumption that psychiatric illness is “inherently bad.” But he distinguishes between mild symptoms that can be helpful and severe symptoms that lead to dysfunction.
Ghaemi says A First-Rate Madness was inspired by people with bipolar who are quite successful in business and politics. Since discussing those people would be a HIPAA violation, “historical leaders are a way for me to bring out those examples in a way that’s publicly accessible to people.”
The Positives of Bipolar
While Ghaemi’s thesis has some detractors, he’s not alone in finding advantages to living with bipolar disorder.
Most notably, Kay Redfield Jamison, PhD, has championed creativity (in Touched With Fire) and a passion for life (in Exuberance) as positive hallmarks of bipolar disorder.
Also, in The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America, clinical psychologist John D. Gartner, PhD, argues that a mild form of mania has fueled American innovation.
Dr. Gartner links relatively high rates of bipolar disorder in the United States to a gene pool heavily weighted with immigrants. The idea is that many immigrants made the leap to a new country thanks to hypomanic traits such as entrepreneurial drive, a high tolerance for risk-taking, creative vision, and self-confidence.
In individuals who don’t cycle into mood swings, this is known as a hyperthymic temperament — and it is found disproportionately in relatives of people who have full-blown bipolar.
Finding Strength in Bipolar’s Challenges
Self-help coach and author Tom Wootton drew on personal experience to develop his “bipolar advantage” approach, which mirrors much of Ghaemi’s thinking. By accepting and wisely managing the mood disorder, Wootton teaches, an individual with bipolar can harness elements of hypomania such as enhanced creativity and productivity. Depressive introspection can yield deeper awareness and insights. And emotional pain can be a catalyst for personal growth.
Embracing Bipolar as an Asset
Steve B., of Colorado Springs, Colorado, was especially struck when he read Wootton’s books. He relates Wootton’s message to a remark made by a successful friend with bipolar.
“My friend, who’s a published author, said a lot of the reason we can do what we do isn’t necessarily in spite of [having bipolar], it’s because of,” explains Steve, a licensed insurance agent who founded a statewide organization of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA).
Harnessing Bipolar Traits for Success
For example, Steve says, “If I’m in kind of an arrogant mood, I’ll just go to somebody and I’ll say, look, don’t mess with me because I can out-think you and I can out-talk you. There’s times when the racing thoughts and the tangential thinking and the pressured speech can get you into a lot of trouble, but also it can help you sell things — that’s my background, sales and customer service — and be able to problem-solve.
“If you leverage it properly and don’t go overboard, it’s amazing the things you can do.”
Steve believes that traits associated with his bipolar 1 helped him create and run the nonprofit BrainStorm Career Services for Psychiatric Disability, a subsidiary of DBSA Colorado Inc., while holding down a day job.
“The leadership qualities, I think, have always been there,” says Steve. “But when I figured out why I act the way I do, and when I got past the real dysfunctional behaviors, yes, [bipolar] absolutely has fueled and accelerated the leadership stuff.”
Recognizing the Tipping Point of Hypomania
Celebrating the “hypomanic edge” sets off alarm bells for many professionals who treat people with bipolar.
Russ Federman, PhD, a psychologist in private practice who previously served as director of counseling and psychological services at the University of Virginia, saw a dangerous tendency among the students with bipolar he counseled. In the early stages or “lower levels” of hypomania, he says, students find themselves more productive than usual. Then they’ll avoid treatment to protect their energized mood.
David Miklowitz, PhD, a UCLA psychologist and bipolar disorder researcher, puts it this way: “I think where we get into trouble … is when it’s implied that people with bipolar are more creative than other people and then the logical leap that people make is, ‘Well, if I go off my medications, then I’ll be really creative.’ And that’s when disasters tend to occur.”
The Creativity Paradox
Furthermore, research indicates that depressive episodes cause a strong reduction in creativity. A study published in Psychiatry Research showed that people with bipolar found that elevated moods foster their creativity. Eighty-two percent of participants reported feeling more creative during periods of hypomania or mania. But during periods of depression, creativity was significantly lower. “This may suggest that rather than the presence of hypo/mania enhancing creativity, that depression may play a larger role in dampening it,” the authors wrote.
The Fine Line Between Creativity and Destruction
Big Daddy Tazz, a stand-up comic in Winnipeg, Manitoba, knows all about the tipping point.
“If I could be grounded and still be manic, which is never ever going to happen … that’s when my brain works the best,” says Tazz, a father of two. “I am so creative and so willing to take a risk and think outside the box.
“It’s a different level of thinking, but also it’s the most destructive.… It’s like not having an off switch,” he adds.
Maintaining Career Success Through Stability
Tazz spent seven years working toward fully accepting his bipolar disorder, and the necessity of staying on medication. This commitment to stability hasn’t hurt his career; his longstanding credits include the CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival, the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, the Comedy Network’s Comedy Now! series, and a lead role in the show Mixed Blessings.
His performances often feature riffs on growing up in a small prairie town, being a “fat guy”, interpreting toddler speech, and his elder son’s attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — a diagnosis Tazz shares. Then there are his sets as the “Bipolar Buddha,” dedicated to spreading enlightenment about mental illness through humor.
“I have accepted what other people perceived as the biggest blow to me, which is bipolar disorder or a mental illness or whatever you want to label it. I’ve not only come to terms with it, but joke about it and speak about it in a positive light,” Tazz says.
Building Resilience While Living With Bipolar
That kind of good outcome in the face of life’s blows pretty much defines resilience. In A First-Rate Madness, Ghaemi summarizes the psychological view of resilience as an interaction between temperament and adversity. In conversation, he points to research that suggests having a hyperthymic temperament provides insulation against post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
More broadly, exposure to adversity can provide what Ghaemi calls a “mental vaccine” against future hardship. In his view, mood shifts create a petri dish for cultivating resilience.
“People with bipolar disorder … have traumatic manic or depressed episodes, and then it goes away. They actually recover from these episodes,” he explains.
Learning to Weather the Storm
For Tazz, experience and education have fed the resilience that helps him weather mood shifts.
“I’ve been in the deepest pits that I have ever been in, some of them dug by myself, and I can climb out of them,” he says. “I also know that the next thought is just a feeling. If I am suffering a depression, it’s just depression. It’s not really based on anything other than maybe some chemistry.”
So is resilience an attribute of the hyperthymic temperament or developed through dealing with bipolar’s challenges? Are traits like creativity and leadership inherently linked to the disorder or merely enhanced by elevated mood?
The jury is still out on those questions, and the chicken-and-egg debate spills over to the qualities of spirituality and empathy. Do the altered states of mania and depression produce mystical insight, or are people with bipolar more in need of faith’s comforts? Is there a neurological relationship between depression and empathy, or does personal suffering increase compassion for the suffering of others?
A Unique Sensitivity to the World
“I personally think that people with bipolar disorder have a unique way of perceiving the world,” says Roumen Milev, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist and researcher in Kingston, Ontario. “They have increased sensitivity.”
For example, he says, “When people are depressed they experience the world in a different way. They become more sensitive to the world and to the pain in the world.”
Positive Outcomes for People With Bipolar
Dr. Miklowitz prefers to focus on how positive psychological traits can contribute to a better outcome with bipolar.
In his view, traits like spirituality, creativity, and resilience are worth cultivating as protective buffers. Having a supportive faith community, or a satisfying outlet like painting or playing an instrument, provides a life-affirming counterweight to mood extremes.
It’s very important, he says, “for people with bipolar disorder to think about their personal goals for recovery — not just taking medication and only taking medication, but are there other things that could be helpful to their long-term quality of life?”
Finding Faith in the Face of Uncertainty
Beth A., a veterinarian in New York state, counts spirituality as one of the many coping skills she has learned to help manage her bipolar.
Beth says she grew up in a Christian household, but her faith was not very strong when she went through a series of hospitalizations for depression throughout the 1990s. If anything, she says, she was angry at God for messing up her life. Her outlook began to change after a particular exercise during inpatient group therapy.
The therapist had us write down all our anxieties, “past, future, present,” Beth recalls. Then we had to figure out which items on the list we could actually influence that day. Everything else was placed in a symbolic “worry box” and left in the hands of a higher power for the time being.
Beth recounts her illumination: “We couldn’t change people. We couldn’t change their reactions. It helped me to realize how much I didn’t have control over, and I think that pointed me towards developing more faith.
“There are so many things that we have to let go of and put into the hands of a higher power, whatever that may be, and simply try to hang on to that sense of faith that … things will get better with time.”
Spirituality as a Source of Resilience
Beth says that when she can’t feel any hope during a depressive episode, faith reassures her that the dark period will eventually end. In turn, she says, spirituality helps her see having bipolar as more of a blessing than a curse.
“I feel a common bond and energy with all of humanity.… I feel God has challenged me with this illness so I would develop empathy for others and not take anything I do have for granted.”
Turning Empathy Into Purpose
Steve says the empathy he has developed through having bipolar “gives me a reason to get up in the morning.”
When he was first diagnosed, he recalls, it was the worst news. He was convinced he would never own another business, that everything he tried to do would fail. As he got more involved with the peer support community, however, he found a power surge to rival hypomania.
“I’m in a world that I never even thought existed … helping people that I never even thought of wanting to help,” he explains. “And it just energizes me.”
How Mood Disorders Shape Leadership
Ghaemi backs up his argument with a wide body of research that makes for interesting reading. He shows that depressive pessimism links to a more realistic assessment of circumstances, that the “divergent thinking” of hypomania enhances creative problem-solving, and that aspects of depression and bipolar disorder increase resilience.
Thus, Winston Churchill, whose well-documented deep depressions and energized moods indicate bipolar 2 disorder, became a pre-eminent leader during World War II. He was realistic about the threat Hitler posed, perceived that war was required, and rallied the nation to endure hard times just as he had survived bleak periods.
His predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, is condemned for appeasing Hitler. In truth, Ghaemi says, Chamberlain was hampered by the unrealistic optimism and attachment to the status quo characteristic of people without similar mood symptoms.
Bipolar Traits in Action
Ghaemi convincingly explains that the mercurial Civil War General William T. Sherman invented the “total war” philosophy, destroying a swath of the South because he saw the harsh necessity. Franklin Roosevelt, who exhibited persistent hypomania, was willing to experiment with new programs during the Great Depression.
On the other hand, Ted Turner fared poorly in a corporate setting because his bipolar traits were better suited to entrepreneurial pursuits like creating CNN. We can’t all lead a country through turmoil, but it makes sense to find a role that plays to bipolar strengths.
Editorial Sources and Fact-Checking
UPDATED: Originally printed as “Accentuate the Positive,” Winter 2012
