Mental Health in Advertising

You wake up. You’re standing on the rooftop of a house in a neighborhood you’ve never been to before, staring down at the driveway. You can’t figure out if this is a dream or not. This episode started a while ago — you have no idea how long it’s been — when your mind felt as if you were at the wheel of someone else’s car and you were backing out onto a busy street. Someone was in the passenger seat blasting the radio and flipping the stations and scream-singing into your face. Someone else was in the backseat holding a shrieking child and shouting questions up at you. An ambulance blared inside your skull. Each of these noises was an onslaught of thoughts that unraveled into your first (and, mercifully, your only) psychotic episode. And now, as you wake up staring at the driveway, you realize that you can no longer trust your mind.

We’re going to be upfront about this: Some of our current and former staff members at Mightily have struggled with mental illness. Which should come as no surprise. Roughly one in five adults in the US experience a mental illness, and about 7% of US adults (or 17.3 million people) battle clinical depression. Plus, the coronavirus has hardly helped bolster everyone’s sense of wellbeing. Antidepressant prescriptions are on the rise. Collectively, our nation seems beleaguered in a fog of anxiety. Conditions that fall under “mental illness” range from autism to schizophrenia to PTSD, but the people at Mightily who we talked to tended to share stories about how they suffered from depressive or hypomanic episodes. And while psychosis may be an extreme manifestation of their illness, their workaday lives can still be fraught with what William Styron called “the formless shapes of doom.” As one colleague said: “Depression and anxiety becomes such a wave in front of you that you decide not to surf it. You decide to let it eat you.”

Since we work in advertising, the question of whether mental illness affects creativity hovered about these conversations. The notion that artistic genius and “madness” are linked is as old in the Western mind as Dionysian blood rituals symbolizing creation arising from chaos. Even today, a 2012 study of 1.2 million people in Sweden found that creative professionals were more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than the general population. Yet other studies caution that “the overall literature supporting this association is relatively weak.” No objective standard exists for measuring either mood disorders or creative output, and scholars point out that their traits often overlap: “Increased energy, ideational fluency, reduced need for food or sleep and extreme task-absorption can accurately describe intense creative activity — or a (hypo)manic episode. Which one? Researchers have difficulty telling.”

Nonetheless, even so eminent an institution as Stanford was publishing bulletins as recently as 2002 titled “Researchers find link between creative genius and mental illness.” Simon Kyaga, the lead author of that 2012 Swedish study, has said: “When you’re manic, you get more things done, but you also get more and wider ideas. And the more ideas you have, the more creative you are.” The experiences of the Mighties on staff who have wrestled with bipolar disorder bear out the thinness (and even toxicity) of this argument. Mania, they say, “feels kind of amazing.” You feel like you don’t need to sleep or eat, and everyone you meet is a new friend. “It’s this feeling of endless energy. You have all these ideas and you want to share them. But the ideas aren’t great. They’re just happening faster, but it doesn’t matter because you can’t finish any tasks. But it definitely feels like you’re a fucking genius.”

Some of our coworkers, starting their careers as artists, felt like they romanticized being bipolar when they were younger. “That’s a common thing, especially among creatives,” one of us said, “to feel like they need that instability or pain to be able to create in a way that they want to. Which is a falsehood.” Since mania does feel amazing, people sometimes lie about being in a manic state because they don’t want it to end. So even when they know how to separate inspiration from illness, a mood disorder can still confer upon them a strange sense of comfort. (“It’s like a companion. It’s always there. If it was gone, I don’t know that my inner monologue would be the same.”) And working in an industry with tight deadlines and squeezed margins and pressure-soaked pitches may lead people to hold onto certain symptoms of mental illnesses because obsession can provide the smokescreen of stability: “When you make it all about one thing, like I did with work, it becomes — ‘As long as I’m doing this, I’m fine.’”

The people we talked to all seemed to agree that, as they’ve gotten older, they recognize that those obsessions are signs that their mind is tricking them. They describe depression as a thief, as that murky companion that steals upon them over the course of months, trying to convince them that the sense of bleakness they feel is a permanent fixture of their reality. For them, medication is the “life-changer,” but they’d only change dosages if they observed a routine of exercising and talking to a psychiatrist and still remained depressed. Counseling helped, they said. One of our colleagues’ therapists also has a mental illness, which perhaps is the reason he can talk about it in a way that feels forgiving and empathetic. And that may be close to the heart of the mad-genius quandary: “I think that mental illness is a particular kind of struggle that results with you being a little more empathetic, and I think that empathy definitely doesn’t hurt creativity, and it doesn’t hurt problem-solving and thinking abstractly and being able to tie things together and put yourself in different roles.”

One of the revelations for me, in writing this piece, is that all the people I spoke with never struck me as mentally ill in any sense that, I now realize, was probably stereotyped. They just seemed like top-tier professionals. I asked them whether having a mental illness carried any stigma. Way less than it did 15 years ago, they said, but, yes. Which is why they wanted to talk about it — because it gives other people permission to talk about it, too. And which is why they work at Mightily. When one colleague switched medications, that colleague’s supervisor came up with a solution tailored to everyone’s schedule that allowed the department to maintain productivity. “That understanding we have that people can hold tremendous value for a company despite being bipolar — that has been really, really meaningful to me,” the employee said. “Seeing the creativity and positivity and community of Mightily made me feel like not only was it a place I super wanted to work in, but I also liked it because it felt safe.”

The extent to which mental illness dovetails with the creative vision will long remain a subject of debate. We don’t have all the answers. And we’re aware that advertising is not the only field that can exert, at times, outsized pressure on the people who work in it. But advertising has earned a reputation as a marriage-ruiner, a family-stealer, a soul-destroyer — especially now, when layoffs are fueling burnout and panic attacks. Some agencies are offering their workers mental health resources like more time off or in-office counselors or subscriptions to teledoctors, and while it’s tempting to attribute those overtures to retaining talent just to shore up the bottom line, the messaging that’s pouring out this Mental Health Awareness Month suggests that the work-world is waking up to the need of bringing this taboo to light. At Mightily, our commitment to telling the truth for our clients extends to being honest about ourselves, too. We’re nothing if not flawed and human. Yet our hope is that that admission has allowed our people to find, in their art, health and healing. And that sense of safety has allowed the rest of us to marvel at the work they create, as dazzling and intricate as their own minds.

Special thanks to Alisha Wheatley for insights and concepting and Jason Lee for art direction.