ABOVE: Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998), lauded for its “harrowing frankness and unreserved sexual revelation.” Researchers say that there is a connection between art, sex, and mental illness. We’re just saying, is all. No offense, Tracey.

Some researchers in Britain say that they have completed a survey which suggests a link between schizophrenia and art, and also shows that artists have more sexual partners than the world in general, thus confirming that a) yes, great artists kind of have a screw loose; and b) great artists also turn out to be a loose screw. The pair of psychologists were looking into why mental illness hasn’t been removed from the gene pool by natural selection, and the answer seems to be that being a little kooky is, statistically speaking of course, totally hot.

It seems artists and schizophrenics share a trait referred to by psychologists as “unusual cognition”—the tendency to feel sort of dreamy, cut off from reality, and overwhelmed by your own thoughts. But the schizophrenics also tended to suffer from “introvertive anhedonia”—social withdrawal and emotional void, which the artists didn’t. It seems that schizophrenia and a career in the arts are, in a way, two sides of the same coin, with the artists channelling their mental wobbliness into their creative work. The second part of the survey found that artists reported, on average, twice as many sexual partners since age 18 than the general population, and that the more seriously they pursued their art, the more partners they had. So, young Casanovas around the world: art school is the place for you.

LINK: The Guardian > Mental illness link to art and sex