art isn't a surface activity

Jeanette Winterson writes in praise of the crack-up.

The stories are well known; Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear and went mad. Sylvia Plath gassed herself. Anne Sexton committed suicide. Emily Dickinson was manic-depressive. Virginia Woolf worked through alternating bouts of madness and depression for most of her life. The mad, bad and dangerous wild boys of high art and popular culture make great copy—whether it's Caravaggio on the run for murder after one of his rages, or Allen Ginsberg, naked and drunk, howling through Manhattan. The women—Plath, Frida Kahlo, Maria Callas, Janis Joplin—imploding like dark stars, are the stuff of obsession.

The collision of creativity and mental instability is so marked that the tortured artist has become a cliché. But with depression rising fast right across the population—and twice as fast among women as men—it is worth trying to separate the cliché from the truth it masks, and to ask whether the connection between creativity and depression can help us think again about the bigger picture.