Sensitivity and addiction
Writer Pearl Buck famously commented, “The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.”
A number of people with exceptional abilities have used drugs and alcohol as self-medication to ease the pain of that sensitivity, or as a way to enhance thinking and creativity. Sometimes they risk addiction.
Beethoven [above] reportedly drank wine about as often as he wrote music, and was an alcoholic or at least a problem-drinker.
Among the many other artists who have used drugs, alcohol or other substances are Aldous Huxley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allen Poe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Allen Ginsberg, composer Modest Musorgski, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, and Tennessee Williams.
> continued in my article Gifted, Talented, Addicted
douglas eby
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