The Sylvia Plath Effect In Poetry

THE SYLVIA PLATH EFFECT

The Sylvia Plath effect is the phenomenon that poets are more susceptible to mental illness than other creative writers. The term was coined in 2001 by psychologist James C. Kaufman. Although many studies (e.g., Andreasen, 1987; Jamison, 1989; Ludwig, 1995) have demonstrated that creative writers are prone to suffer from mental illness, this relationship has not been examined in depth. This early finding has been dubbed "the Sylvia Plath effect", and implications and possibilities for future research are discussed. Kaufman 's work further demonstrated that female poets were more likely to suffer from mental illness than any other class of writers. In addition, female poets were more likely to be mentally ill than other

Though we generally live with a sense of purpose born from our desire for unity, we may occasionally be struck by how senseless everything seems. This is the feeling of absurdity, the awareness of the contradictory universe we live. The absurd man is someone who lives with this feeling of absurdity, who consciously maintains his awareness of the senselessness of everything around him. We go through life with a sense of meaning and purpose, with a sense that we do things for good and profound reasons. Our daily activities and interactions are dictated primarily by the force of habit. We seek to see ourselves as free agents from this perspective. All our actions and reasons seen absurd and pointless. The feeling of absurdity is closely linked with the feeling that life is

And it should be noted here that both Kesey 's One Flew over the Cuckoo 's Nest and Hannah Green 's (also a pseudonym for Joanne Greenberg) I Never Promised You a Rose Garden were published in 1963, the year in which The Bell Jar was published — and yet, of the three writers, only Plath committed suicide. It was due — at least in part — to Plath 's work and her dramatic end that the early women 's liberation movements in the United States were spawned. This led to a great surge of literary writing by women, a fact that should lead us to a serious contemplation of the major ideas of the era that preceded the new "freedoms" for women because only in a clearer understanding of that recent history will we avoid another time of tragedies for the Sylvia Plaths of the