I read this last week and found it quite
interesting; because this is an artsy fartsy kind of place,
perhaps others would be
interested:<br>================<br>From REUTERS Online, 7/25/01<br><br>Clues to
Future
Suicide Contained in Poets' Words<br><br>By Will
Dunham<br><br>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The writings of poets of various
nationalities who committed suicide contain words and language
patterns that give clues about their eventual fate,
researchers said on Tuesday.<br><br>Using a computer program
that examines word usage in written texts, the
researchers analyzed 156 poems written by nine poets who
committed suicide and 135 poems written by nine poets who
did not. They found that the suicidal poets
gravitated toward words indicating their detachment from
other people and preoccupation with
themselves.<br><br>``The key finding is that we were able to distinguish
features of people's mental health by the language they
use,'' said James Pennebaker, a University of Texas
psychology professor who conducted the research along with
University of Pennsylvania graduate student Shannon Wiltsey
Stirman.<br><br>``The words we use, especially what often appear to be
the unimportant words, say a lot about who we are,
what we're thinking and how we're approaching the
world,'' he added.<br><br>The study appears in the journal
Psychosomatic Medicine.<br><br>The researchers looked at the
works of John Berryman (1914-1972), Hart Crane
(1899-1932), Sergei Esenin (1895-1925), Adam L. Gordon
(1833-1870), Randall Jarrell (1914-1965), Vladimir Mayakovsky
(1893-1930), Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), Sarah Teasdale
(1884-1933) and Anne Sexton (1928-1974), all of whom took
their own lives.<br><br>It compared their works to
poets matched as closely as possible by nationality,
era, education and gender. All the poets were
American, British or Russian.<br><br>The comparison group
included Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(1919-present), Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), Denise Levertov
(1923-1997), Robert Lowell (1917-1977), Osip Mandelstam
(1891-1938), Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Adrienne Rich
(1929-present) and Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950).<br><br>The poets who committed suicide used many more
first-person singular self-references such as ``I,'' ``me''
and ``my'' and fewer first-person plural words than
did the non-suicidal poets.<br><br>``Issues of
identity, isolation and connection to others is revealed in
pronoun usage,'' Pennebaker said in an interview. ''One
of the most telling words of all is the word 'I.'
People who are suicidal or depressed use 'I' at much,
much higher rates, and there's also a corresponding
drop in references to other people.''<br><br>The
suicidal poets also generally reduced their use of
communication words such as ``talk,'' ``share'' and ``listen''
over time heading toward their self-inflicted deaths,
while the non-suicidal poets tended to increase their
use of such words.<br><br>The suicidal ones also used
more words associated with death, but surprisingly the
amount of words with negative emotion (for example,
``hate'') or positive emotion (''love'') did not vary
significantly between the groups.<br><br>Pennebaker said
previous research has found that suicide rates are much
higher among poets than among other literary writers and
the general public, and that poets are more prone to
depression and bipolar disorder, also called
manic-depressive illness.<br><br>``As a group, no one would call
poets a particularly bubbly, chipper group,''
Pennebaker added.<br><br>He said the patterns of language
used by the poets who eventually took their lives
could serve as ``linguistic predictors of suicide'' in
current poets. ``This is not some kind of causal
relationship. We're not saying that if you use 'I' a lot, then
you'll commit suicide. It's just simply a marker of
greater risk,'' Pennebaker said.
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