Mental Health - what does all this have to do with creativity

There are very legitimate reasons why educators should be concerned about assessing and guiding the growth of the creative thinking abilities. I would like to discuss a few of these.

Schools are legitimately concerned about the mental health of children, adolescents, college students, and adults. They would like to be able to help their students avoid mental breakdowns and achieve healthy personality growth. These are legitimate concerns of education. But what does all this have to do with creativity?

Actually, it has a great deal to do with creativity. There is little question but that the stifling of creativity cuts at the very roots of satisfaction in living and ultimately creates overwhelming tension and breakdown. There is also little doubt that one's creativity is his most valuable resource in coping with life's daily stresses.

In one study, a battery of tests of creative thinking was administered to a group of schizophrenics who appeared to be on the road to recovery. Many of them were being considered for vocational rehabilitation by the State Department of Welfare. These individuals manifested an astonishingly impoverished imagination, inflexibility, lack of originality, and inability to summon any kind of response to new problems. Their answers gave no evidence of the rich fantasy and wild imagination popularly attributed to schizophrenics. There was only an impoverished, stifled, frozen creativity. They appeared to be paralyzed in their thinking, and most of their responses were the most banal imaginable.

Although it will be difficult to prove, I suspect that schizophrenics and others who "breakdown" under stress constitute one of the most unimaginative, noncreative groups to be found. I also suspect that it was their lack of creativity rather than its presence which brought about their breakdowns. Certainly the schizophrenics tested lacked this important resource for coping with life's stresses. Creativity is a necessary resource for their struggle back to mental health.