No tags yet.
I had a writer friend mention recently how difficult it is to forget about past heartbreak and it got me thinking about how common depression seems to be among writers.
You only have to look at the historical precedent of literary geniuses who took their own lives after struggling with mental illness for years. Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemmingway, Sylvia Plath and David Foster Wallace, to name a few, are some of the writers we lost too soon.
It's a real problem. Writing is one of the top ten professions for people with depression. It seems obvious at first...I mean, anyone who spends that much time on introspection is bound to get depressed after awhile, right? But after investigating further I discovered that many writers have something neurologically in common with the mentally ill.
Andreas Fink at the University of Graz in Austria did a study of the precuneus, a part of the brain responsible for memory retrieval and self-consciousness. This part of the brain is only active in most people while at rest but in writers and other creative types it's always activated. Who else has an inability to shut off the precuneus? Psychosis patients.
So is it the act of writing, a solitary profession that encourages rumination and long periods alone, or is it the exhaustion of a mental tap that's always running? Everyone has their sad stories and one way writers expunge those experiences is through their work. However, the very act of going inside and being alone with your thoughts can often be like Alice going down the rabbit hole.
Whichever it is, this has been a cautionary tale for me. I'm going to make sure I take time to get outside, spend time with loved ones, and try to balance out my life in a healthier way.
Because writing is a hard mistress.