The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
In fact, for the people in theater, the actors, even though the overall occurrence of depression and mania is lower than that in poets, the fraction of those individuals that have mania is exceedingly high. It's about 30% of those that they looked at who are actors, have manic episodes or have full blown mania.
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Turns out that if you were to look at the profession or I should say among the professions they looked at in this study, 'cause they didn't look at all professions, those in the military and those who are professional athletes or had jobs in the social or natural sciences, of those, there was a lower percentage of those that had depression or mania.
It turns out that 75% of these eminent poets, these highly accomplished poets had major depression, whereas only about 20% of those poets had manic episodes. So again, it's not that being a poet is going to give you mania, certainly we're not saying that, it's not that being a poet is going to give you depression, but it turns out that people with depression and people with depression and mania seem to gravitate towards poetry or at least are very successful at poetry. Again associative correlative no causal relationship here.
But it is really striking to see how the creative occupations, poetry, fiction, art, non-fiction writing, even though non-fiction writing is about non-fiction, it's still creative, music composition, theater, much higher incidents of things like mania.
whereas at the opposite extreme of the graph, those that were poets, so these are eminent individuals, people that were exceptional poets, exceptional fiction writers, exceptional artists or non-fiction writers, well there, especially for the poets, you find that as many as 90% of these very successful poets had either depression or mania. As high as 90%, that's incredible. Contrast that with military where it's as few as 10% or professional athletes where it's as few as 20%, and for the professional athletes, as I mentioned before, none of them had mania.