First, I am not contemplating suicide. At least not now. Since I was very little I've always assumed I'd take my own life someday, but I assure you that day is not now or soon. Don't panic.

Lots of people commit suicide. But some really seriously smart, ahead-of-their time intellects have killed themselves, and that intrigues/bothers me.

Some examples:

Vincent van Gogh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh (thread inspired by Don MacLean's song "Vincent")

David Foster Wallace: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace

Ernest Hemingway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway

Sylvia Plath: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath

Hunter S. Thompson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson

Virginia Woolf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf

So these people were all severely depressed, obviously. I'm asking/wondering if there's a connection between their next-level creativity, their depression, and their choosing suicide. A stupid person seeing no hope doesn't seem to bother me as much as someone who I think is smarter than me reaching the same conclusion.

Is it just that some people get THAT depressed and some don't, and some percentage of creative geniuses are going to have this affliction, and I just notice it more because they were "special"? Or were they able to see true hopelessness? Or, like maybe HST, did they just want to go out on their terms?

I don't know. Like I said, I thought about this while listening to "Vincent" - "And when no hope was left in sight on that starry, starry night, you took your life as lovers often do. I could've told you, Vincent, this world was never made for one as beautiful as you."

So it that true?

Hemingway himself said "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."

Highly intelligent people are just naturally inclined to over thinking everything, driving themselves crazy with the weight of the world, rare for them to be the happy go lucky type it seems.

Hard to determine the correlation between intelligence and suicide rates, you could go by IQ but that doesn't really get the big picture either. I dunno, I'm sure there is an incredible amount of stupid people that kill themselves. Lots of times mental health comes into play which isnt tied to intelligence at all etc etc.

Interesting to think about though.

HST aside, offing your self , whatever the reason seems a bit more dumb the Genius.

Because you were "extra" sad. There's always "some" alternative imo.

There's an obvious connection, but it has nothing to do with raw intelligence.

I clicked on the van gogh wiki because I couldn't remember how he killed himself, and when I read it, I thought, 'why would lfs consider van gogh shooting himself in the chest and surviving for two days a genius level suicide?'

then I saw who else was linked and I lol'd

To me, Hemingway had this amazing ability to make a cool exciting life seem boring and stupid, so I'm not surprised he killed himself. His books are incredibly boring.

I don't think depression is in any way related to intelligence or creativity. It's a different part of the mind. I can't prove that of course, it's just what I've observed.

so yeah I am disappoint that this thread is all srs biz and not about awesome ways people have killed themselves

why does Hunter get a pass, because he was getting decrepit and had physical ailments? He was suffering and presumably so too was say, Turing.

this

your post has made me want to go and attempt to get past page 12 of infinite jest

I don't see how anyone except the person who killed themself could make that judgement. How do you know how much they suffered? How do you know what they felt and thought?

I don't know what I find this, but I find it something.

yeah doesn't jive with someone with the mental strength to quit the booze and the double doubles imo

I've always known I would end my own life someday. Like LFS, not now or soon, I just know I probably will. I've also had these feelings since an early age. For me it's partly control and partly other things. Depression has factored in to thoughts, but not always. I made a pact with myself a long time ago, and that was:

I would never inflict that kind of pain on anyone that cared about me in the slightest. This easily rules out the next 40 years for me. (depression's mindset is that no one cares about you, so this one takes some honest thinking)

If I ever seriously was planning it, I would plan it for 2 years to the day I felt like that. Arbitrary number, but it's necessary because things pass. Number will probably increase as I get older.

I honestly felt like I'd gone as far as I could under the circumstances and done all the things I have set out to do. This is a number of personal goals for me.


To do anything else outside these parameters, to me, is just stupid and thoughtless. I don't agree with the whole mantra "Suicide is the coward's way out." This is an incredibly moronic statement. There are very few out there that are willing to embrace what people fear the most - while it's definitely not courageous, to call it cowardly is just ridiculous. Even at my most desperate and depressed I've found it easier to continue on, because the idea of death scares me quite a bit.

As to method? who knows. I've thought about it a lot. I think there's probably a link between suicide and genius - just as how there's a thin line between great genius and madness. One comes with the other as far as I'm concerned. (I'm not at all trying to insinuate I think I'm a genius, I'm not, I'm just addressing the OP.)

I think what we do have in common though are minds that don't really have an "off" button. I think this is a trait nearly all geniuses have, if not 100%. I don't have to explain because there are those who know exactly what I'm talking about. It's the reason I think a lot of brilliant people choose drugs - it's simply the only way to get outside of their own thoughts or make them more bearable.

That's all really.

Not quite that, but try this thread for hypothetical ways.

I think it's just something that some people who have fought mental illness/depression know is a possibility. It is kind of weird to see it in yourself from the 50,000 ft. view and know how stupid it is to kill yourself, then have to acknowledge that tomorrow a switch could be flipped and it could look like there is no hope.

when i was in grad school, i went to a seminar where gary becker (sick name drop imo) presented his model of opitmal suicide

http://economics.uchicago.edu/downlo...Approach_4.pdf

LFS - pretty sure I'm gonna have to try some adderall soon... do you have any leftover?

-Al

Suicide most often boils down to a few general categories: hopelessness, mental illness, or religion/martyrdom. There is nothing particularly remarkable about it.

Searching for "deeper meaning" in the suicides of "genius" level people at best displays a poor understanding of statistics, and at worst displays a remarkable amount of disrespect toward the surviving families of "non-genius" suicides.

suicide by giant squid...

There's definitely a correlation between intelligence and depression, and at the highest levels it's pretty much 1-to-1 (i.e. nearly all of the smartest people to have lived have suffered through depression), but I don't think it's because of some deep depressing facts that geniuses know. I think these reasons mostly explain it:

1) Most ridiculously smart people are actually bipolar. Mania obviously leads people to be incredibly productive and to take on huge tasks, so a huge percentage of famous people in general are bipolar. I'm pretty sure at least three of the people that you mentioned in your OP have been diagnosed as bipolar (though I think prob all three posthumously, so take it with a grain of salt). Obviously bipolar disorder has two poles, and the other pole is significantly less fun .

2) People who are really "different" in some ways tend to be different in lots of other ways as well. Really smart people are more likely to come from weird family backgrounds, be gay, have rare physical diseases, etc. Similarly, they're more likely to have various mental disorders. There are lots of possible explanations for this, but it's definitely true.

3) Smart interesting people know that they're smart and are therefore less likely to accept conventional wisdom over their own ideas. Most people consider suicide in their life, but most don't take their own consideration that seriously and accept the conventional wisdom that life is worth living. Really smart people who know that they're really smart probably take their own ideas way more seriously and are probably less likely to accept conventional wisdom. This is doubly true for the type of really smart people that do the kind of interesting things that land them in OOT posts.

4) Smart interesting people tend to live weird, interesting lives (zomg Hunter Thompson) for reasons I explained in part 3 of this rant. As cool as this is, and as lame as it is to think that a cookie-cutter lifestyle might be best, it turns out that it's pretty hard to live an unconventional lifestyle and not be totally miserable.

On a more serious note - my father, who is a psychiatrist (and deals with extreme cases of depression, paranoid schizophrenia) once told me (after a good friend of mine committed suicide) that if someone really wants to commit suicide, there is really no way to prevent it. Very sobering thing to hear from him imo.

-Al

I think you are romanticizing depression, imo. (Though would be interesting to see studies correlating intelligence w depression, if such studies exist.)

Stupid people can be diagnosed with clinical depression as well.

-Al

I'm pretty sure this is 100% it for me. I just think I've always wanted to be able to choose the place, time, and manner of my exit. I would be less likely to kill myself with an impending issue looming or with anything unresolved. I've just assumed that when I'm "done", I'll go.

NOTE: I want to reiterate that these are things I've thought LONG before the actual concept of death was real to me. I'm not saying I know I'm going to do it someday. But for a long time I just assumed that's the way it would end. I really don't know.

That's interesting, because for me it fits perfectly. Again, a focus on choosing my fate and controlling it. Again, I don't think I'd ever kill myself to "escape". THAT would feel cowardly. But the idea of getting everything good I feel I possibly can out of life and leaving gracefully is definitely appealing. It's certainly possible that I will never reach that point and want to squeeze out every last drop until the bitter end. Again, I don't know.

Reading the wiki's, though, it does seem like a lot of those people were or became quite insane before they took their own lives. So I guess the connection is really between great intellect and insanity, not between great intellect and suicide. The suicide is just a bi-product of the insanity maybe.

There are clinically depressed people who would never seriously consider suicide.