快猫短视频

THE words of poets may reveal if they will take their own lives.

Poets are renowned for their suicidal nature鈥攐ne review of 83 depressed
poets from the past found that a quarter of them had committed suicide. While
depression may predispose some people towards writing poetry, the very act of
expressing deep emotions may push others over the edge. Some scholars believe
this is what happened to American poet Sylvia Plath, who killed herself in
1963.

But James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin,
wondered whether the poems themselves might reveal any suicidal tendencies.
鈥淧oetry is extremely revealing,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou get a glimpse of a person鈥檚
蝉辞耻濒.鈥�

With Shannon Stirman of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia,
Pennebaker ran a computerised text analysis program on the works of nine poets
who had killed themselves and nine poets matched by nationality, era, education
and gender who made no suicide attempts. Suicidal poets were more likely to use
singular pronouns like 鈥淚鈥� and 鈥渕e鈥�, rather than plurals such as 鈥渦s鈥� or 鈥渙ur鈥�.
The suicidal poets also tended to shy away from social words like 鈥渢alk鈥� and
鈥渟hare鈥�, although they had no aversion to sexual words like 鈥渂reast.鈥�

However, suicidal poets did not show an increase in the use of words like
鈥渉ate鈥� or 鈥渨orthless鈥� that may convey feelings of hopelessness. Pennebaker
thinks this is circumstantial evidence that suicide follows from feelings of
social isolation rather than from a prolonged sense of hopelessness.

鈥淭his study reinforces my belief that one鈥檚 choice of words reveals much
about one鈥檚 mental state,鈥� says Thomas Oxman, a psychiatry researcher at
Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire.