Addicted To Chaos

When normal people hit a roadblock in life, they put their heads down, struggle through the storm and then live happily ever after. When a writer bumps into tragedy, he breaks out the champaigne. Do writers invite tragedy and turmoil, consciously or otherwise, in order to be writers? I have here a collection of links, quotes and facts to shed more light on this affliction.

"It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going." - Carl Gustav Jung

Sharon K. West, writing for Suite101 ( Contract writers on Suite101 get paid based on page views, so I'm helping her out here by linking to her article ) lays out the facts.
"What do we know of the tragic afflictions of historical figures?
Some who have suffered from depression include Beethoven, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Judy Garland, Claude Monet, Norman Rockwell, and Edgar Allen Poe. Winston Churchill called depression his "little black dog."
Of course, depression is not the only tragic affliction. What of the afflictions of Joseph Merrick, also known as the "Elephant Man," or blind and deaf Helen Keller, or Franklin D. Roosevelt with polio?
We certainly would consider dyslexia to be a tragic affliction. Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Albert Einstein had this affliction. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Pablo Picasso had it as well."

Well, that rules out at least one thing. This affliction of the "tragic" can't be a co-incidence. Which means that someone, somewhere, probably has a study on this, or a thesis and has all kinds of statistics and data to back it up. Well? Uhh.....yeah. There is. "A portrait of the artist as a nutcase".
A perspective on the biological basis of aesthetic preferences from neuropsychological study of artistic creativity by Anna Lee Strachan.
Go figure...

And just when I was patting my back at this excellent analysis and dissection of writers, tragedy and creativity, I bump into the word "art therapy". Which basically means that I must flush my entire post down the loo. But no, I must hit 'publish', close blogger.com, shut down the computer, get drunk and try and forget about this tragedy of a post.