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We have to be careful reading into these sorts of studies, and that care takes a lot of mental energy.

Physicians in biomedical research make this stretch all the time: just because there is a correlation between two traits, does not mean we have demonstrated the directionality or even tne direct nature of a causal vector between them.

"Even authors with no diagnosed mental illness were at heightened risk of dying by suicide."

The more commonplace use of "risk" is as in the term "risky behavior" - if you engage in it, then you increase the likelihood of a bad outcome because there is a direct causal link between the behavior and the outcome. More behavior, more likely outcome. People who smoke have a higher risk of cancer. People who drive while drunk increase the risk of losing control of a motor vehicle.

Writing for a living itself does not increase one's risk of dying by suicide. Living as a professional writer doesn't either. At best, there may be a common upstream causal factor that simultaneously tracks with both the likelihood of any given individual in a population both acting on suicidal thoughts, and also choosing to be an author over a lifetime.

This seems like nit-picking, but it's important to be precise about what the risk is. In the study cited, the risk assessed is a population-based one, the risk of drawing a sample with higher-than-expected numbers of writers and also higher-than-expected numbers of deaths by suicide. It's very easy to mistake that for a causal risk at an individual level: "As a writer, I risk dying by suicide and could avert this fate by becoming an accountant". Not the same. Which dovetails with Mark VanLaeys' point.

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What if the expression of mental illness is "turned down or tuned out" by the mere act of venting through CREATIVE life work? Millions of people would love to do creative work for a living but only those with special talents tend to pay the bills that way. I wonder what's the incidence of mental illness in those who are especially creative but stuck in non-creative work that sucks out their time and energy

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