The relationship between creative work and psychological suffering is real but has been romanticized in ways that harm living makers — suffering is not a prerequisite for creativity, and the work often suffers more from untreated pain than it gains from it. What is true is that creative people often have a heightened sensitivity to experience that makes them vulnerable to certain kinds of difficulty and also capable of certain kinds of perception. To care for one's mental health is not to protect the work from life but to protect the maker who makes the work possible.
Each step builds on the last.