Question

From Beethoven and Van Gogh to Sylvia Plath and David Foster Wallace, the arts teem with stories of creative geniuses who were tortured by mental illness.

That begs the question: to truly be creative, do you need to have a psychiatric disorder?

Answer 1

Not really. It is really a stereotype to associate Creativity with Mental Illness. We humans have so so less understanding of ourselves. We love to make anything and everything very simple.

That's why we have mental shortcuts aka Heuristics. Our Brain actually use Bayes' theorem to construct reality for us all of the time.

Only very few eg Savants or Autism has found correlation with Heightened Memory and that is related to creativity. Other than that it is not it.

Creativity is within every human being from birth. Unfortunately our education system is a genius at killing Creativity. You must have played with the soap or food when you were smaller. Was that not Creativity?

Creativity is like a muscle, you got to use it. There are tons of ways for building it eg Listening to Audio Books, reading non-fiction, doing a habit in a different way, doing one thing new everyday and so forth.