Can Psychiatrists Recognize Mental Illness in Paintings?

摘要

It is widely believed that mental illness is reflected in paintings of mentally ill artists (1). Examples include Van Gogh's "blue" period (depression) and "pink" period (manic phase of bipolar disorder) (2) and Louis Wain's cat paintings (progressive deterioration to complete incoherence, paralleling schizophrenia) (3). However, when we asked 12 psychiatrists to evaluate randomly selected paintings created by individuals with 1) schizophrenia, 2) bipolar disorder, and 3) no psychiatric illness (N=10 for each), they were unable to differentiate paintings by artists with and without mental illness.