46 years after Sylvia Plath commits suicide, son commits suicide

[Liberal_in_LA]

sad

http://news-briefs.ew.com/2009/03/sylvia-plath.html?iid=top25-Nicholas+Hughes%2C+son+of+Sylvia+Plath%2C+commits+suicide


Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath, commits suicide

Mar 23, 2009, 08:37 AM | by Lindsay Soll

Categories:

Forty six years after his mother, iconic poet Sylvia Plath, committed suicide by gassing herself, her son, Nicholas Hughes has also taken his own life. After a battle with depression, reports The Times Online, Hughes, 47, who had most recently worked as a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, hanged himself in his Alaskan home. “His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world)," said his sister, Freida Hughes, in a statement. "He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and, despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next project or plan.”

[girl gone mad]

1. Sad news.

There does seem to be a genetic component to suicide and depression.

[slampoet]

2. Commiting suicide in the Alaskan winter Darkness hardly sounds genetic.

[girl gone mad]

3. The fact that a close family member also committed suicide speaks to an inherited tendency.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070220002218.htm">Recent research also seems to indicate that there is a genetic link:

A Johns Hopkins-led study has found evidence that a genetic tendency toward suicide has been linked to a particular area of the genome on chromosome 2 that has been implicated in two additional recent studies of attempted suicide.

"We're hoping our findings will eventually lead to tests that can identify those at high risk for attempting suicide," says Virginia Willour, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and lead author of the study. An estimated 4.6 percent of Americans ages 15 to 54 have tried to take their lives, according to Willour.

The investigators conducted a family linkage study in which they searched for commonalities in the genomes of family members with bipolar disorder and a history of attempted suicide. The same gene region on chromosome 2 that was identified by this bipolar disorder and attempted suicide study was recently identified by two complementary family studies that looked at attempted suicide in families with major depression and alcohol dependence.

"Family linkage studies are not always consistent, so the fact that all three studies, including ours, point to the same region of the genome is a good indication that we are on the right track toward identifying a gene or genes that play a role in why a person chooses to take his or her own life," says Willour.