From Billie Holiday to Kurt Cobain, Jeff Buckley to Lana Del Rey, we enjoy the music of suffering and sadness, songs that help us through our worst moments – broken relationships, melancholy, mania. Summed up by John Cusack’s indie-sad lad in the film of High Fidelity – “What came first? The music or the misery?” – we espouse the miserable and the hopeless.

However, the musicians behind the songs are often an afterthought. Or if not that, they’re subject to the notion that their depression is a creative spark and their mental illness the driving force behind compelling art. As someone who has suffered from severe depression, the romantic notion of the doomed artist is not all that. You put on weight and then lose it, you sleep too much or too little, and the myriad other symptoms dictate that it’s not the gladiola-swinging, woe-is-me fest it’s talked up to be. But does this connection between art and angst have any foundation?

Read the article “Music-Making And The Myth of The Tortured Genius” on theguardian.com.