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On the Web Wed Nov 10 2010
Cheer Up, Emo Kid
Are writers more depressed than the general population? An excerpt from Sam Twyford-Moore's article "Don't Get Me Down: Reading and Writing Depression" at therumpus.net (read the whole thing here):
"Alice W. Flaherty states in The Midnight Disease that writers are ten times more likely to be manic-depressive than the rest of the population, and poets are a staggering forty times more likely. The overriding concern then becomes a variation on the classic chicken-or-the-egg: Does the act of writing invite mental illness, or does writing come from some need to cope with it? It's not as clear-cut as one or the other, but if it were solely the former, who would go into it willingly?"
