A study carried out at Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005 concluded that writers and their close relatives, when compared with people having the similar educational background and similar IQ levels, had higher rates of mood disorders.
Donald W. Goodwin, MD, in his Alcohol and the Writer wrote that out of 11 American Nobel Laureates, four (Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner) were “clearly alcoholics”. John Steinbeck, the fifth one, according to Goodwin, was “probably” alcoholic.
Researchers at Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Sweden, carried out a study based on the data representing about 1.2 million patients with problems such as Schizoaffective disorder,
depression, alcohol abuse, suicidal tendencies etc., and found that creative persons, especially authors, were twice as likely to commit suicide. Perhaps creativity has a price and an author has to pay it.
Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway (English), Sadiq Hidayat and Taqi Rifat (Persian), Allama I.I. Qazi (Sindhi) and Mishima Yukio (Japanese) are just a few of hundreds of authors who committed suicide.
The list goes on and in fact Joumana Haddad, an Arab woman author, has published Death will come and it will have your eyes, an anthology of 150 poets who committed suicide.
Though the topic is rather gloomy, someone could not refrain from commenting in the lighter vein that writers’ tendency to commit suicide should be included in “occupational hazards”.
