> [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.

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joshcsimmons 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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Kostchei an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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

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paxys an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Quite the opposite in fact. Throughout history the most successful artists have been the well funded ones.

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delichon an hour ago | parent [-]

The most miserable people I've known were rich people's children. Depression is more about the lack of hope than money.

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paxys 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

You probably don't know very many poor people then, because poverty, food insecurity, physical insecurity, homelessness, job loss are all very common depression triggers. It's just that these cases don't make the front page of newspapers at the same rate as celebrities committing suicide.

	▲	delichon 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Poor people trapped in unemployment have something in common with rich kids trapped in lethargy. A kind of spiritual constipation.

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28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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krapp 3 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

When you're poor in a capitalist society, money is hope.

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delichon an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Over-emphasized maybe, but myth? Could Doyle have written a sympathetic lonely depressed addict so well without more than academic understanding of those things?

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chuckadams 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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)

	▲	delichon 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> or at least "pointless" suffering anyway What bulletproof word choice. Robert Harris called Cicero the first modern politician, and that looks right.
	▲	ongy an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Do you have a link to research pointing at antidepressants being no better than placebo?

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nicechianti 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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