The Sylvia Plath Effect: Mental Illness in Eminent Creative Writers

By James C. Kaufman. 2001

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Conservation, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/70e4f2774ff5a4a99a5c28f08b6e26e017dc4c19

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In Conservation

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The effectiveness of creativity training: A quantitative review (2004, background): “Although, at this point, the source of these differences is unclear, it is possible they might be linked to male risk taking and the tendency of women to focus internally when looking for ideas (Kaufman, 2001).”
I Bask in Dreams of Suicide: Mental Illness, Poetry, and Women (2002, background): “Women creative writers have higher levels of stress than their male counterparts, and poets have a higher incidence of mental illness than other creative writers (Kaufman, 2001b).”
Domain Specificity and the Limits of Creativity Theory (2012, background): “And even within larger domains (like the arts) where the evidence seems to suggest a connection, there may be significant micro-domain differences (Kaufman, 2001a, 2001b; Kaufman & Baer, 2002).”
Perceiving benefits after adversity: The relationship between self-reported posttraumatic growth and creativity. (2013, result): “The highly domain-specific nature of the mental illness–creativity link is further supported by the finding that, even within the domain of creative writing, poets present more psychopathology than other kinds of writers (Kaufman, 2001).”
The Assessment of Creativity: An Investment-Based Approach (2012, background): “Although there are, in fact, associations between creativity and mental illness (Kaufman, 2001a, 2001b; Silvia & Kaufman, 2010), the overwhelming majority of creative people are mentally well, not ill!”
Creativity and Well‐being: A Meta‐analysis (2020, background): “There is empirical evidence that mental illness is more particular to eminent female writers than male counterparts (Kaufman, 2001; Ludwig, 1994).”
The Importance of Domain-Specific Expertise in Creativity (2015, background): “…and creativity to specific domains, however, the picture becomes much clearer (e.g., creativity in science at the highest levels is not generally associated statistically with mental illness, but creativity in poetry at such levels is; Kaufman, 2001a, 2001b; Kaufman & Baer, 2002; Simonton, 2010).”