New study links artistic, but not scientific, creativity to poorer mental health

There is a longstanding idea that genius and 'madness' go hand in hand, particularly in creative fields, with many famous artists believed to have struggled with mental health problems.
However, the empirical evidence for this association remains mixed.

The relationship between creativity and mental health has attracted the interest of many psychologists over the past decades. Some past studies have found that creativity is sometimes linked to mental health difficulties, while others collected opposing or inconsistent results.

Researchers recently set out to further explore the relationship between creativity and mental health by analyzing questionnaire results collected from thousands of twins living in Sweden. Their findings, published in Molecular Psychiatry, suggest that this link is greatly influenced by how creativity is measured, which could explain why earlier studies reached conflicting conclusions.

They examined this question for the first time using a highly comprehensive data set, combining longitudinal and genetically informative data with multiple indicators of creativity and both self-reported and registry-based measures of mental health.
They analyzed data collected as part of two surveys run in 2012–2013 and 2022–2023, respectively. These data were collected from a total of 14,658 individual twins living in Sweden, 6,419 of whom participated in both surveys.

The surveys assessed the twins' achievement in various artistic fields, including music, writing, dance, theater and visual arts, as well as science and invention. In addition, the surveys asked participants to report their occupations and psychiatric symptoms and assessed their openness to experience.
The second survey also assessed the respondents' divergent thinking, the ability to come up with various ideas or possible solutions when presented with a problem. Specifically, participants were asked to name 10 words as different in meaning from one another as possible.

In their analyses, the researchers looked at differences in the creativity, self-reported mental health symptoms and psychiatric diagnoses (recorded in Swedish medical records) of identical twins. The researchers measured creativity in both artistic and scientific domains, while also looking at participants' occupations, openness to experience and scores on the divergent thinking test.

The researchers found that the Swedish twins' artistic creativity was linked to poorer mental health. Scientific creativity, on the other hand, was not significantly linked to most mental health conditions, with only some measures linked to fewer mental health difficulties.
They found higher artistic creativity to be associated with somewhat more mental health problems, and genes play an important role in this association.

Though this study suggested the importance of genes, it doesn't mean the environment is not important. Therefore, researchers still need to investigate other explanations of the association.
The researchers found that influences genetically inherited by the twins and shared across the examined traits contributed to the associations they observed. They also observed that earlier depressive symptoms predicted greater openness to experience at a later stage, even in comparisons between identical twins. This suggests a possible causal relationship between depressive symptoms and openness, although future studies are needed to confirm this.

Overall, the team's results suggest that research focusing on the link between creativity and mental health should not treat all creative inclinations the same way. This is because combining different forms of creativity, such as artistic and scientific creativity, could obscure meaningful differences between the two.

Penghao Xia et al., Unraveling the multifaceted relationship between creativity and mental health with longitudinal analyses of genotyped twins, Molecular Psychiatry (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41380-026-03925-5.

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People asked me to mention the differences between artistic and scientific creativities after reading the above report.