by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

A lot has been said about the intertwining of brilliance and madness, but few explore the matter as articulately as New York City's Dr. Richard Kogan, who has distinguished himself as both a psychiatrist and a classical concert pianist (he still plays with his former roommate Yo-Yo Ma sometimes).

"One thing I'm pretty certain of," says Kogan, "is that this diagnosis, bipolar disorder, seems to be over-represented among the great creators in art, literature and music. There's a greater incidence there than in the general population."

Kogan has previously prepared presentations on Gershwin and Tchaikovsky, though it's German composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856) who will be the focus of Kogan's recital/lecture in Montreal, a fundraiser for AMIQuébec (Alliance for the Mentally Ill).

"Schumann clearly suffered from mental illness, so I'll talk about the impact that had on his creative process, both beneficial and negative. There's a speculative component to attempting to do diagnoses on historical figures. It's hard enough to get it right with the patients we actually see, who are living and breathing. But Schumann kept meticulous diaries and wrote a lot of letters, so we have information about his mental state for nearly every day of his adult life."

The most valuable clues, however, may lie in Schumann's own compositions. "I'm going to play, for example, ‘Carnival,' which I believe he wrote during a hypo-manic phase. You can hear it very clearly in the music - the racing thoughts, the flight of ideas. It's practically a catalogue of bipolar symptoms."

The question today is how to maximize the creativity while minimizing the misery of the patients and those close to them. "That's the challenge. One does want to rein in the excesses and lift the floor of the depressions, but whatever intervention you're making, you don't want to lose the creativity, the genius, the individual expression. Part of the reason I like giving these talks in front of clinicians, and also friends and families of people who have mental illness, is that it's worth thinking about. For bipolar disorder, you give a drug like lithium. Before someone whips out a prescription pad, it really is important to think, ‘What are the potential implications of this treatment?'

"The sharpened imagination, the decreased need for sleep which happen in the manic phases, many of these manic individuals don't want to give up the creative energy. They actually wind up doing some of their best work during these episodes."

There's a larger story hiding here, and that's that music may well be as useful as any little pill with a lot of Xs, Ys and Zs in its name, and not only for those suffering from bipolar disorder.

"I think music is an enormously underutilized modality in healing. There's going to be an explosion in the use of music in health-care settings. Everybody knows that music can make people feel better. It can be soothing, relaxing, lift people's spirits. But scientists are beginning to document exactly what it does to the immune system, what it can do neurochemically. Once that happens, it's going to be a legitimately accepted modality.

"Part of what's exciting to me about studying these various composers is that all of them have used music to make sense of their otherwise, in many cases, unbearable obstacles. They wind up healing us, hundreds of years later."

At the Oscar Peterson Concert Hall on Wednesday, June 8, 7 p.m., $35 (for ticket reservations, call 486-1448)

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