LONDON (Apr 30, 1996 1:12 p.m. EDT) -- Poets are crazier than authors or playwrights, but less likely to become depressed or alcoholics, a British psychiatrist reported on Tuesday.
It could be because of the way their imaginations work, said Dr. Felix Post, who wrote the study in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Post examined the cases of 100 famous British and American writers and poets by looking at their biographies. Many good biographies, he said, provided enough detail to do an accurate psychiatric analysis.
"They've got to be really good biographies," Post, a retired psychiatric consultant, said in an interview.
He found in a previous study that writers as a group tended to have more mental and emotional problems than other people -- politicians or scientists, for example.
But poets did not seem to follow the trend. "The poets were less unstable and had fewer depressions than the others."
Careful analysis confirmed this. The poets, including Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Graves, had more mood swings and manic depressions requiring hospitalization.
But they were less likely than the writers, who included Ernest Hemingway and Jack London, to die young or be promiscuous. Only 31 percent of the poets were alcoholics, compared to 54 percent of playwrights.
It seems writing of any sort is linked to poor mental health. Psychosis or depression was evident in 80 percent of poets, 80.5 percent of novelists and 87.5 percent of playwrights.
Half the poets failed to ever achieve "complete sexual union," while 42 percent of playwrights were known for their sexual promiscuity.
Post said it could be down to personality differences, or the way writers and poets work.
"I speculate that it is the imagination of novelists and playwrights, who are far more concerned with intimate human fate -- they've got to identify and empathise with their characters," Post said. "They have greater stress in their writing."
As for the poets: "They don't deal with human fate. They just describe their religious feelings or their love."
Post said his study did not include women writers as women tend to have different patterns of mental illness from men and his study period, starting in 1840, had too few women writers.