"Good, I Look in Those Jeans" (poem) >>> It's All About Perspective

If you want to be a genius, you have three choices:

1. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder ... typically physicists and mathematicians
2. Manic Depressive (Bi-Polar Disorder) ... typically poets and writers
3. Temporal Lobe Epilepsy 

Pick your poison.

Poets

Yesterday, I wrote a poem for a Poetry Contest sponsored by PoetsUnited. In it, I chastised poets for "living in the extremes." It wasn't meant to be mean. I have studied neuroscience and psychology for more than 15 years. There is a price poets pay for their muse. We tend towards emotional polarization, and this has consequences.

Here is a Wikipedia list of Poets who have committed suicide. The list is not complete. The outrageously high rate of suicide amongst poets has been studied. Here are a few extracts:

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.  

"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.  

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.   

"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."  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.  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.  

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.  "As a group, no one would call poets a particularly bubbly, chipper group," Pennebaker added.  

Bad things happen to everyone. No one can prevent, "The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (To Be, Or Not To Be ... was a contemplation of suicide). We can, however, choose the manner in which we perceive them. 

Perspective, is a choice.

Learn to laugh at life ... or it'll laugh at you. :-)