Musical creativity and suicide.

Abstract

The different abilities involved in artistic creativity may be mirrored by differences among mental disorders prevalent in each artistic profession, taking poets, painters, and composers as examples. Using suicide rates as a proxy for the prevalence of mental disorders in groups of artists, we investigated the percentage of deaths by suicide in a sample of 4,564 eminent artists who died in the 19th and 20th centuries. Of the sample, 2,259 were primarily involved in activities of a linguistic nature, e.g., poets and writers; 834 were primarily visual artists, such as painters and sculptors; and 1,471 were musicians (composers and instrumentalists). There were 63 suicides in the sample (1.3% of total deaths). Musicians as a group had lower suicide rates than literary and visual artists. Beyond socioeconomic reasons, which might favour interpretations based on effects of health selection, the lower rate of suicides among musicians may reflect some protective effect arising from music.