starving artists are nuts
doctor christopher g. hudson has explored the association between poverty and mental illness.
Socioeconomic Status and Mental Illness: Tests of the Social Causation and Selection Hypotheses [pdf – american journal of orthopsychiatry, 2005, v.75, n.1, 3–18]This study tests several hypotheses about the underlying causal structure of the inverse correlation between socioeconomic status (SES) and mental illness. It does this through the analysis of a longitudinal statewide database on acute psychiatric hospitalization in Massachusetts for the fiscal years 1994–2000 as well as supplemental census data. The modeling strategy used techniques of structural equation modeling and found that SES impacted directly on rates of mental illness as well as indirectly through the impact of economic hardship on low and middle income groups.
i’m going to take it to the next level, with the well-known phenomenon of “starving artists” as a subset of persons with “low socioeconomic status.” now, i don’t want to draw any conclusions about which comes first, but i want to get this out there so someone else can.
a) everyone knows artists are starving
b) starving is evidence of low socioeconomic status
c) socioeconomic status is inversely correlated with mental illness
d) artists are mentally ill.
it’s circular reasoning. all you have to do is figure out where in this vicious cycle you want to jump in…