The Sylvia Plath Effect

     While we were discussing about the Confessional Poetry Movement in the 1960s, during which poems were written in the first person, "I," and were highly personal, we talked about some amazing poets, such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. What caught my attention was the issue of the Sylvia Plath Effect.

     In 1932, Sylvia Plath was born in Massachusetts. When she turned eight, her father died from diabetes, and his death left a huge impact on her and her poetry, most notably in the poem "Daddy." Plath was an ambitious woman, as she made her first national publication in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950. She was also an outstanding graduate from Smith College as a summa cum laude in 1955.

     Plath was often associated with the Confessional Poetry Movement. Her poems often presented violent images and "playful use of alliteration and rhyme." She was also the first poet to receive a Pulitzer Prize after her death.

     The Sylvia Plath Effect is a relatively new theory in the psychological field. In 2001, James Kaufman, a psychologist who got his Ph.D from Yale University, conducted a study to show that creative writers, especially female poets, are more prone to suffer from mental disorders than any other occupations. He came up with the term "The Sylvia Plath effect" after he found out that many poets who experienced tragedy and depression eventually committed suicide in his second analysis of 520 American women. Other studies suggested that creative people are more slightly at risk, and that they are 30 percent more likely to have a "bipolar disorder."

     Arnold M. Ludwig, M.D, a psychiatrist and a professor at Brown University proposed that "creative people in the artistic profession are more likely to have a mental illness than those in less artistic professions, such as science and business," in his book "The Price of Greatness."

     Kaufman and another psychiatrist, John Baer, also theorized that female poets, who are more vulnerable to "extrinsic motivational contraints," are more likely to suffer from mental illness. They thought that creative people will often "defy the crowd" to follow their own standard, thus resulting in pressures from writing and leading up to a higher level of psychogenic illness.

     Some other writers that were considered having the same symptoms were Virginia Woolf (Modernist Movement), Sara Teasdale (lyrical poetry), Anne Sexton (Confessional Poetry Movement) and Sarah Kane (In-yer-face Theater).