Madness And The Arts

“Charles Dickens fought recurrent bouts of depression with hyperactivity. Hemingway, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf took their own lives. Dylan Thomas drank himself into an early grave. Percy Bysshe Shelley suffered from recurring nightmares and hallucination and died at 30. William Blake heard voices. All artistic geniuses, definitely. All more or less mad.” A new Toronto festival examines the connection between madness and artistic genius, from both clinical and cultural perspectives.