Uh I will post this or I'll post a link to it in the show note captions for you to peruse . But I'll just give you a sense of the extremes on this graph because they're very interesting turns out that if you were to look at the profession or I should say among the professions they looked at in this study because they didn't look at all professions , those in the military and those who are professional athletes or had jobs in the social or natural sciences had the of those there was a lower percentage of those that had depression or mania . In some cases , like those who are professional athletes didn't seem to have , there was no incidence of mania at least in this data set .
So this is a study looking at mood disorders in eminent individuals . So these are people that are not just good at what they do but are exceptional at what they do and explored the percentage of people in given professions with either depression or mania . And this was actually a data set gleaned from more than 1020th century Westerners based on their biographies that were reviewed by other people .
I'd like to just briefly touch upon this idea that certain occupations are associated with a higher incidence of bipolar depression . And in fact , it's been explored at a research level .
But it is really striking to see how the creative occupations , poetry , fiction , art , nonfiction , writing , even though non fiction writing is about nonfiction , it's still creative music , composition , theater , much higher incidence of things like mania . And in fact , for the people in theater , the actors , even though the overall occurrence of depression and mania is lower than that in poets . The fraction of those individuals that have mania is exceedingly high .
But I'll just give you a sense of the extremes on this graph because they're very interesting turns out that if you were to look at the profession or I should say among the professions they looked at in this study because they didn't look at all professions , those in the military and those who are professional athletes or had jobs in the social or natural sciences had the of those there was a lower percentage of those that had depression or mania . In some cases , like those who are professional athletes didn't seem to have , there was no incidence of mania at least in this data set . Whereas at the opposite extreme of the graph , those that were poets .
