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What was wrong with Sylvia Plath?

  • 10-06-2015 8:43pm
    #1
    Posts: 13,712 ✭✭✭✭


    This probably seems like an odd place to start a thread about Sylvia Plath, but ultimately this is a question about psychiatric diagnosis, not literature.

    Here is a paper about Sylvia Plath, outlining her personal circumstances, her background and death, which basically attempts to categorise her psychiatric illness as depression.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539515/
    In summary, the appropriate case-formulation would appear to be: recurrent depressive disorder, severe (without psychotic symptoms);16 or alternatively major depressive disorder, recurrent,17 in the setting of a borderline personality disorder.

    I suspect that many people who are familiar with Plath and have read her diaries, which span a long period of her life, will be surprised by that.

    Plath's poetry reveals a woman who is utterly self-absorbed, and this is entirely confirmed in the diaries, which also reveal a vulnerable woman who has grandiose visions of herself, emotionally cold towards others, intensely emotional towards herself, morbid, and manipulative. Not a pretty picture, eh?

    She never seems depressed, although there is almost no doubt she did become depressed towards the end of her life, after the failure of her marriage. But the woman had encountered suicide and been referred to psychiatrists many times before that, since very early in her life.

    Could she have been psychopathic? Was she a narcissist? Did she have Histrionic Personality Disorder?

    The paper I linked to just doesn't make sense in light of Plath's biographical details and her diaries. But I am not an expert. That's why I am asking here.

    Well, what do you think?


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