Unraveling the multifaceted relationship between creativity and mental health with longitudinal analyses of genotyped twins

Abstract Existing findings of creativity and mental health associations are inconsistent, partly due to heterogeneous assessment of creativity and mental health. Consequently, basic questions concerning the direction and domain specificity of these associations remain unanswered. This comprehensive study used data from 14 658 Swedish twins, including a genotyped subsample, and employed a range of genetically informed and longitudinal designs to examine the direction, nature, and underlying mechanisms of the creativity–mental health relationship. Creativity was assessed broadly, using different measures of artistic and scientific achievement, occupation, personality (openness), and psychometric creativity (divergent thinking). Mental health was measured using both self-report data and registry-based diagnoses. Higher artistic creativity, as indexed by artistic achievement and openness, was associated with worse mental health (e.g., psychosis proneness, major depressive disorder, and anxiety disorder). In contrast, measures of scientific creativity showed predominantly non-significant, or even negative, associations with mental health problems, particularly in the case of occupational creativity. Co-twin control and polygenic score analyses suggested that shared genetic factors played an important role in the observed associations, with the exception of a potential causal association between depressive symptoms and openness, which persisted even in the longitudinal co-twin control model. Genetic correlations further showed shared underlying genetic influences. In summary, our findings offer novel evidence for a complex, bidirectional, and genetically influenced association between artistic creativity and mental health, helping to clarify mixed results in the prior literature.