The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [49]
Recall that pronouns reflect people’s focus of attention. Given that depression causes people to look inward, it follows that a depressive episode would be associated with higher rates of self-referencing pronouns, especially first-person singular pronouns such as I, me, and my. Several studies have found this. The more depressed a person is, the more likely he or she will use I-words in writing or speaking. Most striking is that use of I-words is a better predictor of depression among college students than is the use of negative emotion words.
Depression rates are particularly high among writers, most notably for successful poets. Recent studies indicate that published poets die younger than other writers and artists and as many as 20 percent commit suicide. Although the job of writing poetry may be stressful, a more compelling explanation is that depression-prone individuals are drawn to writing poetry, in part, to try to understand their mood swings. This is especially true for a form of depression called bipolar depression, sometimes referred to as manic depression. Bipolar disorder is especially toxic because it has a clear genetic basis and often catapults people through extreme mood swings without any apparent cause. Unlike other forms of depression, people diagnosed with bipolar disorder are much more likely to commit suicide.
Kay Redfield Jamison, a respected scientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has written extensively on the close link between the artistic temperament and bipolar disorder. In her research, she finds that a disproportionate number of poets have symptoms consistent with bipolar disorder, which she discovered through their memoirs; reports from family members, friends, biographers; or the authors’ poetry. Would it be possible to identify bipolar disorder and suicide proneness through the computer analysis of the poets’ published works? Working with Shannon Stirman, who is now a clinical psychologist, we examined the published poetry of eighteen poets, nine of whom committed suicide. We discovered that suicidal poets used far more I-words in their poetry than nonsuicidal poets. Particularly striking was that the two groups of poets did not differ in their use of negative emotion words. Although this was a small sample of poets, the effects were statistically impressive.
As we started looking more closely at the language of the suicidal and nonsuicidal poets, something caught our eyes. The suicidal poets, in using I-related pronouns, seemed to be psychologically close to their sadness and misery in ways that the nonsuicidal poets were not.
For example, consider the first line of Sylvia Plath’s well-known poem “Mad Girl’s Lovesong” where she is mourning the loss of love: “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.)”
Compare her sadness with the words of the well-respected poet Denise Levertov in the first line of her poem, “The Ache of Marriage”: “The ache of marriage: thigh and tongue, beloved, are heavy with it, it throbs in the teeth.”
Although both poems deal with a similar topic, Plath’s use of I suggests that she is embracing her loss. Levertov, on the other hand, seems to be holding her pain away at arm’s length—almost as if she is looking at it from a more distant (and safer) third-person perspective. Indeed, as one reads the collected works of these two authors, it is apparent how the two differ in owning or embracing their feelings of loss, alienation, and depression. Plath may be the more popular poet for this reason. With the tool of first-person singular pronouns, she takes us closer to the edge so that we can get a feeling of her personal despair.
ARROGANCE, LOSS, AND DEPRESSION: THE CASE OF MAYOR GIULIANI AND KING LEAR
Closely linked to sadness and depression are the feelings of loss that come