Dr Wills (Reference Wills2004) assumes that I have overlooked Reference JamisonJamison's 1993 work. In fact, the hyperbolic Touched with Fire only compounds the research problems of her original (Reference Jamison1989) study. No matter how many famous artists she collects to ‘prove’ her case, there is no triumph in finding so much disturbance when your self-selected sample is padded with it, giving scant or no attention to creative people who manage to be both prolific and stable. Jamison (Reference Jamison1993) herself warns that ‘labeling as manic-depressive anyone who is unusually creative, accomplished, energetic, intense, moody or eccentric both diminishes the notion of individuality in the arts and trivializes a very serious, often deadly illness’ (p. 8) – yet she proceeds to do precisely that. Blurring the distinction between serious bipolar disorder and cyclothymia, with chapter titles like ‘Their Life a Storm Whereon They Ride’ she relies heavily on the overblown anguish of Romantic poets to hammer her case home. This makes thrilling reading, but it is not science.

As for those ‘many academic studies... over the past century’ (Reference WillsWills, 2004), Jamison is more likely to drop names than disclose content in the attempt to build a historical pedigree for her work. Lombroso, to whom she refers most often, claimed that people of high ability were small, pasty and emaciated, with irregular teeth (Reference Lombroso1895). Unfortunately, since readers are about as likely to consult the original Lombroso (or Nisbet or Moreau) as they are to scrutinise Jamison's methods, the delusion persists that there is long-standing empirical weight behind the notion of the ‘mad’ creative person.

Dr Wills finds Ludwig's statistics (Reference Ludwig1995) acceptable, but I have difficulty with imprecise variables such as ‘any problem’ of parents and siblings, one of the few significant differences found between the families of creative artists and others – and even these, Ludwig himself admits, are ‘very weak’ (Reference LudwigLudwig, 1995: p. 157). And how does one measure ‘non-conformity’, ‘odd behavior’ or ‘anger at mother’ with any precision or reliability?

Although Wills thinks psychological autopsies are worthy tools, their validity is compromised by dependence on self-reports and second- and third-hand accounts, biographers’ natural tendency to shape the story around their opinions of their subjects, and clear experimenter bias – after all, the determined user of psychological autopsy can discover ‘madness’ in anyone's life. Jamison uses such ‘evidence’ of mental illness as ‘possibly transient hypomanic episodes’ (p. 199), interest in spiritualism, spendthrift tendencies, and vague gossip: ‘thought by others to have had at least a trace of insanity’ (p. 168).

Finally, Wills declares that my view of the creative person (Reference SchlesingerSchlesinger, 2002) is naïve, as well as Laingian in its denial. I do not claim that bipolar disorder does not exist, only that there is no hard scientific evidence that creative people are more likely to suffer from it. As for my concerns being passé – reflecting the ‘antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s’ – the news is that objection to reckless labelling never disappeared. It is actually growing, particularly in the USA, where even the general public has noticed the link between elastic diagnoses and pharmaceutical profits. And I make no apologies for believing creative people to be heroic – especially when so many assume they are mentally disordered.