High Ability, Gifted/Talented, Suicidal
A news story about two Caltech students who died of suicide in the weeks before the recent commencement made me wonder again: Do more gifted people die from suicide? Are high ability people more vulnerable?
The Caltech students who died were senior Jackson Ho-Leung Wang, a mechanical engineering student from Hong Kong, and junior Brian Go, a computer science and applied and computational mathematics major from Maryland.
The Caltech Counseling Center page Depression/Suicide Prevention reports: “In the general U.S. population it is estimated that 2 to 3 percent of men and 4 to 9 percent of women are depressed at any given time. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death in U.S. college students, and suicide in the young has tripled over the past 45 years.”
The Hoagies’ Page on Depression and Suicide declares, “Although it is a popular notion that gifted children are at risk for higher rates of depression and suicide than their average, no empirical data supports this belief, except for students who are creatively gifted in the visual arts and writing (see Neihart & Olenchak..). Nor, however, is there good evidence that rates of depression and suicide are significantly lower among populations of gifted children.”
Another expert source notes, “There seems to be a greatly increased rate of depression, manic-depressive illness, and suicide in eminent creative people, writers and artists especially. The incidence of mental illness among creative artists is higher than in the population at large.”
From Creativity, the Arts, and Madness – by Maureen Neihart, Psy.D.
One example of a creatively gifted person who died by suicide was Sylvia Plath [1932 - 1963]. She published her first poem when she was eight and was “Sensitive, intelligent, compelled toward perfection in everything she attempted,” according to the Short Biography on sylviaplath.de.
“She was, on the surface, a model daughter, popular in school, earning straight A’s, winning the best prizes.”
She described one of her suicide attempts in her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. “After a period of recovery involving electroshock and psychotherapy Sylvia resumed her pursuit of academic and literary success, graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955 and winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England.”
When she began directing in the forties, Ida Lupino sometimes claimed not to know the best way to line up a shot or specify a line reading, explaining “Men hate bossy women. Sometimes I pretend to know less than I do.” [From my article 












