Suicide and Giftedness: High Ability, Gifted/Talented, Creative
Caltech tragedy raises questions
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.”
Suicide among the creatively gifted
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.
Sylvia Plath
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.”
Psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison, who has written books on depression, including her own, says “Plath, like many people with dramatic lives, suffered from severe depression. Teenagers may appreciate Plath because they are experiencing intense moods and emotions for the first time. They are also at the average age for the onset of depression.”
The image is a self-portrait by Sylvia Plath, from the profile page on Sylvia Plath.
Nicholas Hughes
On March 16, 2009, Plath’s son, Nicholas Hughes, an expert in freshwater fish, committed suicide at the age of 47.
A news story reported, “Unlike his sister Frieda, who has dealt with their harrowing family history partly by talking about it and scrutinising it in her writing, her poetry and her art, Dr Hughes had always actively avoided the subject.
“I never heard Nick tell anyone about his parentage,” his friend Joe Saxton said. “He wasn’t embarrassed; it just wasn’t something he wanted to be a feature of him. That’s the irony. He spent his life trying to get away from all this, to find a place where he could be himself. Then the stupid bugger commits suicide and starts it all up again.”
From Ted Hughes death, not Sylvia Plath, tipped son Nicholas into depression, The Australian.
Trying to “get away” from your depression may be a natural impulse, but when it becomes active and enduring denial of depression, it may be deadly.
Sinead O’Connor
Sinead O’Connor realized her ‘demon’ needed medical attention: “I began to have this quiet little voice every now and then – although ‘voice’ is the wrong way to put it. It’s your own thoughts just gone completely skew-whiff: ‘Look at that tree, you might hang yourself on it.’ Until the volume went up so loud that I took myself to hospital.”
From post Sinead O’Connor renews her creativity by dealing with depression.
Unfortunately, there are not always alarms.
A serious issue
In Growing Up Gifted Is Not Easy, Elaine Aron, PhD. writes, “This piece was inspired by an article in The New Yorker titled “Prairie Fire,” about the suicide of a gifted early-adolescent boy. His death came as a complete surprise to everyone who knew him.”
In his article An Overview: Understanding and Assessing Suicide in the Gifted, Andrew S. Mahoney, M.S., L.P.C., L.M.F.T. writes, “When discussing the topic of suicide among the gifted population, one runs into the same divergent, often unexplainable, ambiguity associated with this special population.
“Though there is no conclusive evidence that the gifted are more prone to suicide than the non-gifted (Delisle, 1986), suicide among the gifted is a serious issue.”
Social pressure to achieve
High Sensitivity, existential dread – these may be among the reasons high ability people may be vulnerable to suicide, whether or not at a higher rate. But another reason may be social pressure to achieve.
The article Push to achieve tied to suicide in Asian-American women (CNN) notes, “One study has shown that as young as the fifth grade, Asian-American girls have the highest rate of depression so severe they’ve contemplated suicide… ‘Model minority’ pressure — the pressure some Asian-American families put on children to be high achievers at school and professionally — helps explain the problem.”
Whatever the pressures, whatever the mental health challenges, even people with suicidal depression can be helped. But they need to seek help.
