Building a sustainable career in the creative industries is a challenging proposition. Creative workers face high levels of employment insecurity and limited career development opportunity. Those working in the sector must build discipline-oriented career self-management skills, while also finding ways to cope with the psychologically demanding…

Research addressing a link between musical creativity and mental disorder has predominantly considered composers rather than performers, and has been dominated by the questionable use of retrospective biographical research methods. This article calls for research to explore more widely the stressors and challenges that living musicians face in…