The Mad Genius Thesis

By Mnemosyne Media

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Episodes: 150

Description

Is there a thin line between brilliance and madness? The Mad Genius Thesis podcast investigates the complex and often controversial relationship between creativity and what we variously call madness—whether it’s labeled mental illness, neurodivergence, or simply the wild temperament of genius. Each episode explores cutting-edge research in psychology, neuroscience, and the creative arts to understand how extraordinary minds work—and why they so often seem to walk the edge. We unpack the myths of the “mad genius,” examine the lives of history’s most electrifying creators, and challenge the assu

Episode Date
Why Modern Freedom Inevitably Leads to Depression
Apr 20, 2025
Anatomy of Melancholy: The book that predicted modernity
Mar 09, 2025
The Birth of Tragedy: Sanity, Madness, and Greek Culture
Mar 09, 2025
"Dark patches": Walt Whitman's struggles with melancholy
Feb 27, 2025
Murder, Madness, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Feb 27, 2025
Basquiat: 'Perishable' - Art as a Response to Grief and Loss
Feb 27, 2025
"Get as Much of That Poison Out" : Tupac's Art as Therapy
Feb 27, 2025
César Vallejo : The Poet Who Predicted His Own Death
Feb 25, 2025
Mirrors and Monsters: Jorge Luis Borges's Nightmares
Feb 25, 2025
Rabindranath Tagore's Restless Spirit : Versatility and Contradiction
Feb 25, 2025
"The Drama of Desperation": Depression's Grip on James Agee
Feb 25, 2025
Rimbaud: Poetry, Trauma, and the Flight from Art
Feb 24, 2025
Borstal Boy : The Inner Turmoil of Brendan Behan
Feb 24, 2025
Diane Arbus – Photography, Obsession, and the Dark Side of Creativity
Feb 24, 2025
"'I have cultivated my hysteria": Baudelaire's embrace of mental illness
Feb 24, 2025
Numbers and Nerves: The Creative Struggles of Srinivasa Ramanujan
Feb 24, 2025
Darkness Visible, William Styron's memoir of major depression
Feb 23, 2025
Yukio Mishima: Art, Obsession, and Tragic Genius
Feb 23, 2025
The Beat Era : "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness."
Feb 23, 2025
The Age of Melancholy and the Failure of Modern Psychiatry
Feb 21, 2025
"The world has used me ill." The Story of Jurassic Mary
Feb 21, 2025
Melancholia : The Western Malady
Feb 21, 2025
The Sickness Unto Death : Finding Selfhood Through Despair and Creativity
Feb 21, 2025
The Divided Self : Exploring Duality in Thomas Mann's works
Feb 21, 2025
Magic Theater of the Mind : Hesse's Exploration of the Subconscious
Feb 21, 2025
The Addictive Spotlight : Maria Callas and the Perils of Fame
Feb 21, 2025
The Daemon Knows – Genius, Inspiration, and the American Sublime
Feb 21, 2025
Tolstoy's Torment : Mental Anguish and Creative Genius
Feb 21, 2025
From Melancholia to Depression – How Psychiatry Redefined Mood Disorders
Feb 21, 2025
Melancholy and Genius – The Eighteenth-Century View of Creative Despair
Feb 21, 2025
Camille Paglia : Order and Chaos in the Creative Psyche
Feb 21, 2025
From Ecstasy to Despair: The Two Sides of Isadora Duncan
Feb 20, 2025
Emily Dickinson : "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"
Feb 20, 2025
Emperor of Eccentricity : Exploring the Mind of Howard Hughes
Feb 20, 2025
"Coldness & Desertion of the Spirit": Hume's Dark Night of the Soul
Feb 20, 2025
Hitchcock's Gaze: Vision, Voyeurism, and the Watching Birds
Feb 20, 2025
'My Hideous Progeny': Mary Shelley, Mental Torment, and the Birth of a Monster
Feb 20, 2025
What if the Right Brain was the Master and the Left Brain was his Emissary?
Feb 20, 2025
Melancholy and the Muse: Lincoln's Depression and Creative Leadership
Feb 20, 2025
Creative Illness : Jung and the Red Book
Feb 19, 2025
Recycling Trauma : Autobiography in the plays of Tennessee Williams
Feb 19, 2025
The Agony and the 'Origin': Darwin's Journey Through Illness and Inspiration.
Feb 19, 2025
Five Ways Split: The Fragmented Genius of Judy Garland
Feb 19, 2025
Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir by Kay Redfield Jamison
Feb 19, 2025
An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison
Feb 19, 2025
Shadow Behind the Spotlight: Marilyn Monroe’s Genius and Pain
Feb 18, 2025
Holden's Breakdown: Mental Health in Salinger's World
Feb 18, 2025
The Crack-Up : F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Maladjustment to Life"
Feb 17, 2025
"Mad Shelley" : The Storm of Emotion and The Spirit of Defiance
Feb 17, 2025
Beyond Reason: Kafka's Nightmare and the Birth of Modern Literature
Feb 17, 2025
"Aching Desolation": James Dean and the Art of Projecting Pain
Feb 17, 2025
Robin Williams: The Pain Behind the Laughter
Feb 17, 2025
Genius and Heroin : Creativity and Self-Destruction
Feb 17, 2025
The Birth of the Mad Genius Idea : A Conversation
Feb 16, 2025
The Evolution of the Mad Genius Concept : A Conversation
Feb 16, 2025
Jean-Jacques Rousseau : Restless Wanderer
Feb 13, 2025
"Made Mad All My Life" : Samuel Johnson's Struggle with Mental Illness
Feb 13, 2025
Creativity: Light, Dusk and Dark Night of Soul
Feb 13, 2025
The Milk of Paradise – Opium, Imagination, and 19th-Century Literature
Feb 13, 2025
Irritability of the Heart : Dickens's Troubled Mind
Feb 13, 2025
The Act of Creation and the Unquiet Mind : Finding Creativity in Mental Illness
Feb 13, 2025
Creativity and Crime – The Dark Side of Innovation
Feb 13, 2025
Tangled Brains, Brilliant Minds : Exploring the Link Between ADD and Creativity.
Feb 13, 2025
Dreams and Delirium: The Surrealist Exploration of Mental Illness
Feb 13, 2025
Surviving the Storm : Francis Ford Coppola and Bipolar Disorder
Feb 12, 2025
From Torment to Triumph: How manic-depression fuels the creative fire
Feb 12, 2025
The Fever of the Mind : William James and the Price of Creativity
Feb 12, 2025
Margaret Cavendish : Finding Sanity in "A World of Her Own'"
Feb 12, 2025
Nine Chains to the Moon and a Mind in Chaos: The Inner World of Buckminster Fuller
Feb 12, 2025
"A Grief Without a Pang": John Stuart Mill's Struggle with Depression
Feb 12, 2025
From Melancholia to Prozac – The History of Depression
Feb 12, 2025
A Field Guide to Melancholy
Feb 12, 2025
Paul Erdős – The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
Feb 12, 2025
Tortured artists: Ten stories of creative struggle.
Feb 12, 2025
Heavier Than Heaven – The Life, Art, and Struggles of Kurt Cobain
Feb 12, 2025
A First-Rate Madness – Mental Illness and the Making of Great Leaders
Feb 12, 2025
Enthusiasm and Divine Madness – Plato, Love, and the Inspired Soul
Feb 12, 2025
"The Bad Thing" : Depression and the Genesis of David Foster Wallace's Genius
Feb 12, 2025
Vincent van Gogh & Richard Dadd – Insanity, Genius, and the Search for Meaning
Feb 12, 2025
Jones Very – Poetry, Mysticism, and the Search for Divine Truth
Feb 12, 2025
From Despair to Art: Exploring Poe's Creative Process
Feb 12, 2025
Divine Mania – Madness, Prophecy, and Inspiration in Ancient Greece
Feb 12, 2025
The Dark Side of Creativity – Genius, Destruction, and the Ethics of Innovation
Feb 11, 2025
Byron : Stormy Passions and the Impulse to Create
Feb 11, 2025
Freud on the Couch : Depression, Addiction, and the Birth of Psychoanalysis
Feb 11, 2025
Poets on Prozac by Richard M. Berlin
Feb 11, 2025
Divine Madness – Psychology, Spirituality, and the Unconscious Mind
Feb 11, 2025
The Bipolar Express – Creativity, Cinema, and Mental Illness
Feb 11, 2025
Positive Disintegration : How Mental Distress Fuels Creativity
Feb 11, 2025
Mania – A Short History of Bipolar Disorder
Feb 11, 2025
From Torment to Art : Sylvia Plath's Creative Exploitation of Depression
Feb 11, 2025
Beyond the Moors : Unpacking the Brontë's Mental Health Struggles
Feb 11, 2025
Wordsworth : Finding Solace in Nature, Battling Inner Turmoil.
Feb 11, 2025
The Price of Genius: Is Psychopathology the Cost of Greatness?
Feb 11, 2025
Nietzsche: The Philosopher Who Walked The Edge of Sanity
Feb 10, 2025
Jim Morrison – The Myth, the Madness, and the Music
Feb 10, 2025
"Nature Screaming in My Blood" : The Terror of Insanity and The Scream
Feb 10, 2025
Sanity, Madness, and Transformation – The Psyche in Romanticism
Feb 10, 2025
The Alchemical Vessel : Transforming Mental Anguish into Creative Gold
Feb 10, 2025
William Blake: Lunatic or Genius? Exploring the Fine Line
Feb 10, 2025
Strong Imagination – Madness, Creativity, and the Evolution of Genius
Feb 10, 2025
The Cracks Where The Light Gets In: Philip K Dick's Trauma and Dissociation
Feb 10, 2025
Logician Kurt Gödel's Journey to the Edge of Reason
Feb 10, 2025
Manic Depression and Creativity – The Highs, Lows, and Genius of the Mind
Feb 10, 2025
Madness and the Romantic Poet – Genius, Mental Illness, and Literary Myth
Feb 10, 2025
Jack Kerouac : A Man Helpless Before His Own Mind
Feb 09, 2025
Creativity: The Magic Synthesis – Psychology, Art, and the Creative Mind
Feb 09, 2025
A Serious Character – Ezra Pound’s Genius, Controversy, and Legacy
Feb 09, 2025
Creating Minds – The Psychology of Genius and Innovation
Feb 09, 2025
The Neurodiversity Edge – How Inclusion Fuels Innovation
Feb 09, 2025
The Power of Different – Neurodiversity, Creativity, and the Mind
Feb 09, 2025
Dancing with Ophelia – Madness, Creativity, and Recovery
Feb 09, 2025
The Mystery of Creativity – Myths, Mechanisms, and the Science of Genius
Feb 09, 2025
Wittgenstein : Battling Angst and Discovering Logic
Feb 09, 2025
The Bleeding Canvas : Frida Kahlo's Agonized Poetry
Feb 09, 2025
Art, Activism, and the Struggles of Lorraine Hansberry
Feb 09, 2025
Questioning Greatness: What it really means to be gifted
Feb 09, 2025
The Enigma of Alan Turing – Genius, Innovation, and Isolation
Feb 09, 2025
Shamanic Wisdom and Mental Illness – A New Perspective on Healing
Feb 09, 2025
Henry Cavendish: Autism, Isolation, and Scientific Revolution
Feb 09, 2025
J. Robert Oppenheimer – Genius, Depression, and the Burden of the Bomb
Feb 09, 2025
Billie Holiday – Artistry, Addiction, and Resilience
Feb 08, 2025
Isaac Newton – Genius, Obsession, and the Edge of Madness
Feb 08, 2025
Hemingway’s Brain – Genius, Trauma, and the Cost of Creativity
Feb 08, 2025
ADHD is the Hunter's Mind in The Modern World
Feb 08, 2025
ADHD 2.0 – Creativity, Mental Health, and the ADHD Brain
Feb 08, 2025
Intelligence – Reconsidering IQ, Creativity, and Genius
Feb 08, 2025
Anger, Rage, and the Daimonic – Understanding the Dark Side of Genius
Feb 08, 2025
The Power of Neurodiversity – Reframing Mental Differences as Strengths
Feb 08, 2025
Pox – Syphilis, Genius, and the Madness of History
Feb 08, 2025
The Decade of Genius and Madness That Transformed Art
Feb 07, 2025
NeuroTribes – The History and Evolution of Autism
Feb 07, 2025
Autism and Creativity – The Hidden Link to Genius
Feb 07, 2025
Bird – The Life, Genius, and Struggles of Charlie Parker
Feb 07, 2025
The Creating Brain – Neuroscience of Genius and Creativity
Feb 07, 2025
Genius and Despair: The Inner World of Virginia Woolf
Feb 07, 2025
Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall by Frank Brady
Feb 07, 2025
Nikola Tesla – Genius, Visionary, and Enigma
Feb 07, 2025
The Autopsy of Genius: Examining Evidence of Beethoven's Health
Feb 07, 2025
A Brilliant Madness – Patty Duke’s Battle with Bipolar Disorder
Feb 06, 2025
The Insanity Hoax – Debunking the Mad Genius Myth
Feb 06, 2025
Nijinsky A Life of Genius and Madness
Feb 06, 2025
Robert Lowell: Poetry, Madness, and the Creative Mind
Feb 06, 2025
Dionysus in Literature - Exploring Literary Madness
Feb 06, 2025
John Nash: When Chaos Swept Away a Carefully Constructed Life
Feb 06, 2025
Touched with Fire – Bipolar Disorder and the Artistic Mind
Feb 06, 2025
Dean Keith Simonton and The Science of Greatness
Feb 06, 2025
Creativity and Mental Illness - Expert insights from psychology, neuroscience, and related fields.
Feb 06, 2025
Simon Kyaga - Rethinking the Mad Genius Myth
Feb 06, 2025
Introduction to the Topic
Feb 06, 2025