It's not my place to say . But I do think it's important that all of us understand that these psychiatric conditions carry with them tremendous maladaptive weight .
Or that being manic is a good thing ? Again , we return to the basic foundational criteria for bipolar disorder and major depression , which is that the pressured speech , the not sleeping , the incredible increases in energy and the flights of ideas are generally not going to lead or I think it's fair to say are not going to lead to good places , in fact , often lead to bad places . But we would also be wrong if we didn't consider the fact that there is a somewhat inextricable relationship between mania and creativity .
And again , they're extremely maladaptive , much , much higher instance of , of suicide et cetera . But we'd be wrong to say that certain aspects of manic episodes don't lend themselves well to creativity or that certain aspects of major depression don't lend themselves well to creativity or to the performing arts or to poetry that said in no way , shape or form . Do I believe that being depressed is a good thing ?
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 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 .
