Tuesday, July 8, 2025

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The Geniusly Depressed

By Nick Colin

Feb. 21 was the one-year anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s death. The brilliant and brazen writer, reporter, and icon died of a gunshot wound to the head at the age of 67.
Thompson was the reason I became a journalist. I discovered him my senior year of high school after I came upon one of his books titled Generation of Swine: Shame and Degradation in the 80s.
Within the next year I would read every book I could get my hands on and mimic everything from his writing style to smoking a cigarette out of a holder. Of course over time it was essential to develop my own writing style, not just because his was unacceptable to most newspapers and teachers, but also because emulating genius is almost sacrilegious.
Thompson seemed so full of life and way too smart to end it.
It’s difficult to understand why so many writers seem to suffer from depression. Perhaps, with the gift of writing comes an oversensitivity that makes them more easily prone to a negative outlook.
Writers put so much of themselves into their work, that at the end of the day it is hard to separate from it. It’s also difficult to determine whether a reader is rejecting the piece or the person writing it because of how much of their heart and soul is in the work.
Much of the writing process is spent in solitary, probing the deepest and sometimes darkest regions of the brain. This process can lead to disturbing emotions and memories that are best kept buried away.
Many studies show that writers are manic depression magnets.
Reporters and writers are forced to analyze and interpret many ugly truths about the world. Most of the evening news reports on tragedies and criminals with a fraction of that time dedicated to positive human-interest stories.
The long list of famous poets, reporters, and novelists who suffered from the debilitating madness of depression includes: Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot to name just a very few.
Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald drank himself to death by his early 40s. He died believing himself a failure. Today he is revered as a great American writer who defined the Jazz Age of the 1920s.
Ernest Hemingway, author of The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man In the Sea, took his own life at the age of 62, after a failed attempt a few weeks earlier. He had suffered from depression for years, enduring electro compulsive therapy, before ending his life with a shotgun blast to the head.
Studies show that artists, which would include writers, feel emotions so intensely and are prone to eccentric behavior. The combination can be overwhelming and explains why many drink heavily and use drugs. They need to escape from these feelings before they are driven crazy by them. 
Perhaps, Thompson and other writers and artist like him were to smart and aware for their own good. It is said that “ignorance is bliss” and there is a lot of truth to that. To be oblivious of the evils and inevitable let downs in this world has to be good for the soul of the average compassionate human being.

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