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October 10 is World Mental Health Day. As per the World Health Organization (WHO), the overall objective of the Day “is to raise awareness of mental health issues around the world and to mobilize efforts in support of mental health”.
One can’t help but remember the iconic Dutch painter, Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), on this day. Today, his paintings are famous across the world. But not just for their artistic quality. Perhaps what endears Van Gogh to every new generation of admirers is the fact that his paintings are a testament to his short, sad life, one full of pain. And yet despite all the pain, he achieved so much (mostly posthumously) that most of us can only dream of.
There are other famous figures who suffered from neuropsychiatric issues throughout their lives and died because of them. One is reminded of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, just to name a few.
But Van Gogh is special. José Pedro Nogueira da Mota summed it up best in his 2021 essay Creativity and Mental Illness: Vincent van Gogh as the Archetypal Figure:
The particular richness of the psychiatric symptoms he experienced (extreme mood swings, including long periods of depression and prolonged episodes of highly active, volatile and productive states, altered sleep patterns, visual and auditory hallucinations, hyper religiosity, extreme irritability and marked violence), and his pre-morbid personality, make him a subject of fascination for many.
While medical historians have pondered for decades about the exact nature of his ailment(s), one thing is for certain: All of it started early.
Born in the Dutch village of Groot-Zundert on March 30, 1853, Van Gogh “always had the inclination to melancholy” as per his father.
This continued in his youth. The painter admitted to this in a letter to his younger brother Theo: “My youth was gloomy, cold and sterile”.
Van Gogh lived in various European cities including Amsterdam, London and Paris, where befriended the famous artist, Paul Gaugin.
“In 1888, he moved to Arles in southern France and in the next year, volunteered himself for hospitalization in Saint-Rémy, a province in France where Théophile Peyron, a physician treated him. During his stay there, he painted his immortal, The Starry Night and others,” Kalyan B Bhattacharyya and Saurabh Rai note in their 2015 paper The neuropsychiatric ailment of Vincent Van Gogh.
In December of that year, part of Van Gogh’s right year got mysteriously severed. Again, historians have debated whether it was he himself who committed the mutilation. Or was it Gaugin who severed it in the midst of a quarrel with Van Gogh. Afterwards, Van Gogh presented the pinnae to a prostitute in a nearby brothel. One remembers his famous painting linked to this episode, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.
The circumstances surrounding his death too are shrouded in mystery. As Bhattacharya and Rai write, it is a matter of debate as to whether Van Gogh shot himself or was accidentally shot by someone: “A few months later, he presumably shot himself though no gun could be found in his vicinity, and Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh's biographers, argue that he was accidentally shot by two boys who had been handling a malfunctioning gun.”
Van Gogh breathed his last on the evening of July 29, 1890.
What ailed Van Gogh? Willem A. Nolen, Erwin van Meekeren, Piet Voskuil & Willem van Tilburg in their 2020 paper New vision on the mental problems of Vincent van Gogh; results from a bottom-up approach using (semi-)structured diagnostic interviews wrote that the painter most likely suffered from comorbid (occurring together) illnesses.
These include bipolar disorder (then known as manic depression), in combination with (traits of) a borderline personality disorder. He may have also suffered from malnutrition due to an unhealthy lifestyle, alcoholism and epilepsy.
Bhattacharya and Rai, on the other hand, hint at epilepsy, Ménière's disease, and chronic absinthe intoxication.
But did Van Gogh’s mental illness play a role in his genius as an artist? Mota does not think so:
“The fact that so many central figures in the arts and sciences have had various forms of mental illness makes it seem almost impossible that creativity and psychopathology are only linked by mere chance. We have sought a scientific explanation for this association and although there may be an association between these two characteristics, it is not necessarily causal.”
He adds that “a predisposition for greater creativity can occur without the presence of mental illness and vice versa; the fact that both may coexist may be due to the sharing of similar neurological or genetic mechanisms”.
So, while Van Gogh’s ‘madness’ did not lead to the flowering of his artistic genius, it nevertheless endears us to him.
Mota adds: “There are many who prefer to celebrate rather than “pathologize” the artist; those will be the ones that consider the inspiring life of van Gogh as an example of extraordinary courage and conviction: Vincent van Gogh has not been a superb artist because of his illness—he has been a fantastic artist in spite of it!”
