Meaningless Depression: The Van Gogh Blues

Book Review: The Van Gogh Blues

Vincent Van Gogh is the poster child for the depressed, unstable artist, and a strong argument for the correlation between a troubled soul and brilliant creativity.

I refuse to believe that being creative means I’m doomed to a life of mental disorders. When a recent mood-funk sent me reeling, I set out on a search for information, ran across psychotherapist Eric Maisel’s work — and stumbled into one of those rare aHa! moments.

In The Van Gogh Blues, Maisel’s underlying theme is that creative-types are in the business of making meaning.

It’s what we do. We connect the dots from this to that, and draw lines between apparently random observations, until they mean* something. Then we invest and reveal the meaning to others in tangible forms: dance, music, words, and imagery.

So artists are driven by the need to express meaning - and when we loose that any sense of meaning in a project (or in our lives) we fall into what Maisel calls “a meaning crisis” (which seems to have a lot in common with a crisis of faith) Any number of things can cause a crisis in meaning; a goal that has been met, a change in life circumstance, a negative thought or doubt that springs seemingly out of nowhere and runs amok. But whatever the cause, if we don’t recover or reinvest a sense of meaning into our work and lives, depression, anxiety, addictions and a variety of other ills can take over. Only recovering a new sense of meaning will pull us out of it - at least that’s the theory and goal of Maisel’s “Meaning Therapy”

To his credit, Maisel does not offer “Meaning Therapy” as a stand-alone catch-all for all mental ills in artists. He stresses that this is only one way to look at depression, and that many ways of viewing and treating it are valid. He acknowledges that creative types tend to attach a lot of meaning to comments or events around them, and so they may be knocked off of their emotional balance more easily than people in more concrete disciplines. Restoring meaning is only part of the solution, and the book touches on the usefulness of anti-depressants, cognitive therapy, and addiction recovery techniques among other disciplines, while always stressing the need for artists to take the responsibility for “making their own meaning.” He believes that “making meaning” needs to become a conscious part of the creative process, and provides plenty of examples and a number of tools to help artists in doing so.

My one issue with the book (other than the hokeyness of the phrase “Meaning Therapy”) is the stress on “meaning making” and the author’s apparent view that the world has no intrinsic value, until we put value onto it. It’s all a bit too too self-referential to suit me…. I prefer to find and reveal meaning, rather than create it from nothingness. I need there to be a sense of purpose that holds up outside of my own head, and so I found the book triggering existential doubts here and there.

Even so… The book still provided that aHA! moment for me. I *have* lost my sense of meaning, both in art and in life, and that sense of loss does seem to the primary issue that’s been troubling me for a while. I’m still exploring the implications, and the possible solutions, including how to invest a sense of meaning back into my art and life.

That single aHA! was more than worth the price of the book, and the trouble of searching for a used copy. (The Van Gogh Blues is currently out of print, so you’ll have to pick it up used.)

Now I’m off to find (or make) some meaning.