Blake, Lord Byron, Tennyson, Woolf, Poe, Sexton, Plath, Kierkegaard, Pound, Roethke, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and David Foster Wallace… the ranks of notable writers and other artists who have suffered from depression, too often fatally, seem infinite. In fact, a 1995 Scientific American article by Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatrist and writer who has chronicled her own struggles with depression, summarized a number of studies suggesting that “artists experience up to 18 times the rate of suicide seen in the general population, eight to 10 times the rate of depression and 10 to 20 times the rate of manic-depression and its milder form, cyclothymia.” These statistics would seem to verify the historic popular association of artistic creativity with madness. But in recent years a countervailing opinion has surfaced among both artists and scientists, particularly in the work of psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer, who argued in his 2005 book Against Depression that this malady has no more to do with creativity than, say, arthritis, and that both are simply painful, pointless diseases that can and should be treated with the most effective medications we can develop and prescribe.

Tim Farrington is an accomplished novelist who adds a spiritual dimension to the discussion of depression and creativity in his recent short book A Hell of Mercy: A Meditation on Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul. For Farrington, who has been hospitalized for clinical depression, the tension between madness, creativity, and enlightenment began early: “I spent my senior year of high school in Honolulu listening to the darker songs of the early Elton John, cutting calculus class to read D.T. Suzuki, slipping away to the Buddhist temple halfway up the Pali, and in general letting the warp and woof of my tidy American future unravel.” He remembers that his first significant bout of depression was not incapacitating, and raised a significant philosophical quandary: