The people of Sweden really need a national pastime. Well, at least a different one, one that doesn’t involve endless studies about things we already know. Sweden seems to be the Study Capital of the World, at least when it’s not ski or lutefisk season.
Don’t believe me? Check the Internet. In between shooshing down black diamond runs and sucking down gallons of fish soaked in lye, the Swedes have completed thousands of studies about the obvious, and just a small smattering of ones that aren’t so obvious.
I have to say that their most recent study falls on the blatantly obvious side. The Karolinska Institute in Sweden recently finished the largest study in their history – 1.2 million people.
They were singled out for their unique attributes. They were schizophrenic, depressed, anxious, alcohol and drug abusers, autistic, anorexic, ADHD sufferers, and suicidal.
Once they got their lineup of whackos, misfits and malcontents, they broke them into two categories of employment for study. On the one side, there were the creatives, on the other, the accountants. The accounts were the control group. Yes, it was the whackos – the creatives – they were studying.
What did they find out? Well, as I said, the obvious. Creatives seem to be a screwed up lot, far more likely to suffer from mental illness than ordinary accountants. Well, only in part. It seems that creatives have a far greater incidence of bipolar disorder sufferers. And as the kicker, families with a history of bipolar disease or schizophrenia were more likely to have children who were creative. As a personal observation, I must have been spawned by an absolute nut house.
For me, that’s just the starter. The researchers decided it was time to look specifically at writers to see if the generally accepted belief that they are highly unstable and more likely to commit suicide was true.
I guess they could have just asked Ernest Hemingway, but it was hard to find enough of him to interview after that little incident in Ketchum, Idaho.
Yes, in the world of creatives, writers are more likely to have schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety syndrome and substance abuse problems. Well, what a surprise! They are also more than twice as likely to pull the plug, pulling a Hemingway Maneuver when things look their bleakest.
I guess we could have just listened to E.L. Doctorow who once observed, “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
And if that weren’t enough, researchers then discovered that the close relatives of these people often found their way into the creative fields, too, for apparently no clear reason as they didn’t really follow up on why this could be so.
So where does it leave all us writers, and since this is my self-analysis, me in particular?
Well, obviously in the lurch and pretty screwed up. The writers who have killed themselves reads like a Who’s Who of Authors: Jerzy Kosinski, Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Brautigan, John Berryman, Karin Boye, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf – It could go on and on. If you Google “Writers Who Committed Suicide” Wikipedia kicks back a couple hundred names, some very well known, others rather obscure.
I profess that I only momentarily contemplated suicide once. It was January 2009. My marriage was in a shambles, the ex-whatever had screwed me up pretty bad, I didn’t know if I should stay or leave, I was living 3,000 miles from anyone I had ever really cared about or for, and I had just dropped my son off at the airport, watching him fly back home after a Christmas holiday vacation, still streaming tears on the drive back to Melbouring.
Kind of the perfect storm for killing yourself I suppose. I still remember driving down the highway, crossing over on that section of road that leads from the Beeline to 1-95. I was on the phone with the ex-whatever on the verge of bawling.
For the briefest of moments, I thought about just driving off the road and hitting a tree. If I had been in the Northwest, this would have been relatively easy because fir trees are everywhere and very unyielding. But I was in Florida; all scrub brush, not a solid object in sight. Oh, sure there were a few palm trees, but these aren’t suitable for suicide. It’s not a sure thing. You could hit it, break a bunch of bones and survive, left to rot in a wheelchair. They’re just too giving. But a fir tree, it’s finito every time. There is no surviving that one.
I guess it was a good thing I was in Florida. Just as soon as the thought entered my mind, it left, never to return. Total elapsed time, about two minutes.
I’m not even sure why I bothered to entertain the thought. Certainly, the ex-whatever turned out not to be worth my time, let alone deciding to end my time here on earth. Few things are really.
Yes, I’ve battled depression, endure anxiety every day, have had some horrible things happen to me in my life, and I suppose others may have even nodded their head when they found out that I had killed myself, thinking, “yeah, I can’t blame him a bit.”
So Swedish researchers, you can take your study and stuff it up your lutefisk holes. I’m not going to let you label me, in part because I don’t understand what “stolligt” means in English. Hell, I can barely spell it. For god’s sake, buy a couple extra vowels if you want us Westerners to understand your useless studies!
Me, I will continue to live my writer life, free of suicidal tendencies. As usual, I buck the norm, skewing the results once again. I’m good with that. It’s taken a long time for me to figure out that I’m very different from most people in the world. It’s taken even longer to accept it. So I’m not about to take the easy way out and call the whole thing square, even if I do live in a place where there are sturdy fir trees everywhere begging the writers of the world to swerve from their path and end it all right there and then.
In the Emerald City, celebrating my creativity and borderline insanity,
– Robb