I suffer from depressive episodes and perform better on the verbal sections of any aptitude test.
There is a grain of truth to this but I think this article implies causation when it's merely a correlation.
My own view is that some people are acutely sensitive to everything that happens around them. Even minor things like unexpected rain on the way to work can turn into an epiphany or a minor tragedy depending on your mood. You're constantly ruminating and over analyzing everything and so its possible that you're good at translating feelings into words.
"There is a grain of truth to this but I think this article implies causation when it's merely a correlation."
Even a correlation is very interesting!
In fact I tend to disagree, I don't think anyone is proposing that the causation must be direct, because there are still intelligent people who are not bipolar or depressive and there are bipolar and depressed people who are not intelligent. But the correlation, which I think everybody assuming is some third factor behind the mental illness and intelligence/creativity, is still interesting.
... of course, it's an interesting correlation in a sea of interesting correlations, and it's hard to tell which of them are genuinely interesting and which are just "throw enough variables together and you'll get all sorts of spurious correlations". But I'd submit that this is an unusally strong signal, as evidenced by the fact that humans have been making this observation for centuries now. Even if it is spurious, I suspect the proof of that would itself have something interesting in it.
There is a grain of truth to this but I think this article implies causation when it's merely a correlation.
My own view is that some people are acutely sensitive to everything that happens around them. Even minor things like unexpected rain on the way to work can turn into an epiphany or a minor tragedy depending on your mood. You're constantly ruminating and over analyzing everything and so its possible that you're good at translating feelings into words.
It gels with my personal experience.