Into the Void: Early Entry

The artist's attraction to suicide is a startling reality. Although often described as a blanket misconception, the stereotype of "artist as self-destructive" is becoming more concretely typical. Research conducted by James C. Kaufman at the Learning Research Institute in California has determined that poets die younger than other artists, and are more susceptible to depression and suicidal tendencies:

''It's a whole confluence of reasons. If you ruminate more, you're more likely to be depressed, and poets ruminate. Poets peak young. They write alone."

Roughly 20 percent of the studied 1,987 dead writers died by suicide. These include but are not limited to: Thomas Chatterton, Paul Celon, Charles Clegg, Hart Crane, John Gould Fletcher, Heinrich von Kleist, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Sylvia Plath, and Hunter S. Thompson.

Wikipedia includes a list of historically-notable suicides. Even a cursory glance will make it disturbingly evident - the artist is statistically doomed to a self-inflicted demise.