Comment by delichon
1 day ago
> [Holmes] battles with drug addiction, loneliness and depression. His genius thrives in part because of these vulnerabilities, not despite them.
If there was a pill for that, how many masterpieces like the Sherlock Holmes books would never be made? The products of misery have always been the devil's advocate's best arguments. If Doyle had not sympathized with Holmes' afflictions, he could not have written him. Or if he had written Holmes as a Mary Sue we wouldn't have cared. (Though for some reason it worked for Harry Potter.)
An effective education requires a certain amount of torture, and it works better when self inflicted.
This is 100% not true.
> An effective education requires a certain amount of torture, and it works better when self inflicted.
It's the tortured artist myth. You can turn pain into art but it's not a prerequisite.
Yeh, I agree with this. My art (painting and building) comes at a much faster rate when I am content. Having time and metal space to contemplate colour scheme, being confident to start something bold: that doesn't happen if I am tired, preoccupied or depressed
Time for harvest and a separate time for planting.
Quite the opposite in fact. Throughout history the most successful artists have been the well funded ones.
The most miserable people I've known were rich people's children. Depression is more about the lack of hope than money.
9 replies →
Over-emphasized maybe, but myth? Could Doyle have written a sympathetic lonely depressed addict so well without more than academic understanding of those things?
He was a physician and had said that his experience treating patients influenced his characters. So, he had more than academic experience, but I'm not sure if it's enough to prove he experienced those things personally.
For every tortured genius whose passion comes from pain, there's a hundred who never get started because they lack the energy to get out of bed half the time, are slowly killing themselves with alcohol and other substances, and so on. But a pill alone doesn't fix that -- hell, current research shows most of those pills do no better than a placebo -- so the mythology of the nobility of suffering will continue for some time hence.
(Fun fact, you know that "lorem ipsum" text that's used as filler? It's not nonsense Latin, it's from a speech by Cicero where he denounces the stoic ideal of suffering being good for the soul, or at least "pointless" suffering anyway)
> or at least "pointless" suffering anyway
What bulletproof word choice. Robert Harris called Cicero the first modern politician, and that looks right.
Do you have a link to research pointing at antidepressants being no better than placebo?
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