Continuing the discussion from Being sz there is no magical cure:
(I didn’t want to hijack the original thread. And, this is an old discussion, going back to the times of the ancient Greeks, actually.)
I haven’t known many schizophrenics, as far as I know.
As far as the scientific literature goes, though, there seems to be clear evidence that ‘schizotypal’ people are more creative than the general populace.
Maybe the ‘schizophrenics’ you knew were truly schizophrenics. By contrast, many of us here who were diagnosed with schizophrenia were later told that psychiatrists that our original diagnosis was wrong, and we weren’t schizophrenics.
I’m not a professional scientist, but it seems scientifically sound to suspect that when we are not considered schizophrenics anymore, our remaining schizotypy does in fact mean that we are more creative.
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/exploration/stories/schizotypes.html
http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/002372.html
“The researchers believe that the results offer support for the idea that schizotypes and other psychoses-prone populations draw on the left and right sides of their brains differently than the average population, and that this bilateral use of the brain for a variety of tasks may be related to their enhanced creativity.”
http://creativealliancemke.org/2012/01/the-unleashed-mind-why-creative-people-are-eccentric/
There are many good things to quote in that article, but just doing a search for schizotypal and schizotypy within it reveals some interesting facts about the proven correlation between measurements of creativity and measurements of schizotypy.
Anyway, you may be right. Maybe ‘schizophrenics’ aren’t more creative than the general population. The scientific evidence seems clear, though: Schizotypal people are more creative than the general population.