You can probably recite, off the top of your head, at least a few creative geniuses who seemed out of their mind. We used Sylvia Plath, Vincent Van Gogh, and Michael Jackson as examples in our piece on creativity and madness last fall. That story surveyed recent evidence linking the two areas–especially the idea that creative types and other people who are vulnerable to mental illness share certain cognitive traits, such as a failure to filter out useless information.

Not all scientists are on board with the “mad genius” concept. In a commentary for the journal Frontiers in Psychology, psychologist Arne Dietrich of the American University of Beirut questions the evidence in support of such a connection. Dietrich emphasizes that the vast majority of creative people aren’t mentally ill, and the vast majority of mentally ill are not geniuses. In short, he says, creativity is not a sign of mental illness at all, but of mental health.

Vincent Van Gogh via Wikipedia

“You cannot make the blatant claim that the whole thing of mental illness is associated somehow to the whole thing of creativity,” Dietrich tells Co.Design. “There are people who are mentally ill and are creative, but the opposite is much more common. So the link is actually negative, not positive.”

The fact that we can quickly name mad geniuses leads us to believe all artists are crazy, and to ignore those who are not.

Most researchers belong to one camp or the other, leaving the interested public to choose sides. But what if there’s a way for everyone to be right? That might sound crazy (or creative) but at least one researcher thinks it’s quite possible. In a paper still in press at Perspectives on Psychological Science, creativity scholar Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California at Davis uses a logical thought experiment to make the case for both sides of the debate.

Simonton calls this unifying concept the “mad-genius paradox.”

Here’s how that paradox works. (Keep in mind this is all theoretical.) First, let’s separate the world into two groups: creative people and non-creative people. Assume that, on the whole, the creative people have lower rates of psychopathology than non-creative people. So, when looking at the world through this creative-or-not lens, we find that creativity is closely connected with mental health.

Now let’s take the creative people from our first example and separate them into two new groups: creative geniuses and creative Joes (our term, not Simonton’s). There’s only a sprinkling of creative geniuses, but assume they suffer higher rates of psychopathology than the creative Joes do. So, when looking at the world through this lens, we find that extreme creativity is closely connected with mental illness.