Clues to Future Suicide Contained in Poets' Words
July 24 -- The writings of poets of various nationalities who committed suicide contain words and language patterns that give clues about their eventual fate, researchers said today.
Using a computer program that examines word usage inwritten texts, the researchers analyzed 156 poems written bynine poets who committed suicide and 135 poems written by ninepoets who did not. They found that the suicidal poetsgravitated toward words indicating their detachment from otherpeople and preoccupation with themselves.
"The key finding is that we were able to distinguishfeatures of people's mental health by the language they use,"said James Pennebaker, a University of Texas psychologyprofessor who conducted the research along with University ofPennsylvania graduate student Shannon Wiltsey Stirman.
"The words we use, especially what often appear to be theunimportant words, say a lot about who we are, what we'rethinking and how we're approaching the world," he added.
The study appears in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.
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 ofwhom took their own lives.
It compared their works to poets matched as closely aspossible by nationality, era, education and gender. All thepoets were American, British or Russian.
The comparison group included Matthew Arnold (1822-1888),Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-present), Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918),Denise Levertov (1923-1997), Robert Lowell (1917-1977), OsipMandelstam (1891-1938), Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), AdrienneRich (1929-present) and Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950).
The poets who committed suicide used many more first-person singular self-references such as "I," "me" and "my" and fewerfirst-person plural words than did the non-suicidal poets.
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