My husband just pointed out this Guardian article to me. Are poems hazardous to our health? Maybe writing poems as therapy isn't such a great idea, after all.

Interesting article Jane. It's true of course that we are, as a group, a bunch of boozy, sedentary, self-loathing nihilists. So hardly surprising we drop off early. Maybe this is behind the fixation with youth in poetry? Publishers are simply scared that they're gonna die before they get a half-decent collection out. Or perhaps poets that commit suicide or contract exotic diseases whilst on foreign 'residencies' (ie. drunken sojourns) are skewing the stats? I intend to get to at least 65. At which point I might as well not be around anyway, what with my nil pension and family history of heart disease and mental illness. Lovely jubbly.

I think it's one of those horse-and-cart thingies. Poems don't shorten a person's life; rather, people who are more likely to die earlier than others are karmically drawn to the poetic form on the basis that the little buggers are short, thus more likely to be completed before the reaper man comes a'knocking.

Well Don Paterson reckons it's being a poet that makes you go mad or get ill because it's all about making connections between things that are unconnected mainly through metaphor and that is crazy-making.
What I think is that poetry often keeps potentially mad people just on the right side of sanity, or potentially ill people just the right side side of healthy. I include myself in that group. The world of poetry positively welcomes the eccentric and the outsider. Surely have to be a little bit weird at least to obsess and struggle the way we do.

I think we should be wary about making easy links between poetry and madness or ill health. I doubt the evidence and there's been other research which counters the claims. I think dentists and farmers score higher in the psychosis scales. There's a very good article on Wieners by John Wilkinson which is worth seeking out. Having said this, I've suffered from depression and was on medication for a year or so. The psychiatrist I was seeing put it into perspective for me, my daily panic attacks and suicidal feelings paled when compared to the morbid self harm and psychotic behaviour of the seriously mentally ill she was also treating. It was the best dressing down I'd been given, all delivered with cheerful aplomb and stopped me in my tracks and made me grateful for my own meagre collapse. A year later I was better and have only had one relapse with a few panic attacks and absences. Anyone else have tales to tell?

Oh, if the walls of Arcadia Court could speak...!

For psychosis and delusions of grandeur, see my first collection Making Tea for the Hatter.

For bowel cancer (now in remission, thanks), see my long poem 'Colon'.

When this research was first released a few years ago, it moved the Manchester Evening News to verse:

"Roses are red, violets are blue, poets will die sooner than you!"

Perhaps a thunderbolt then struck the author dead on the spot?

Makes a change from all that "x Poems To Save Your Life" bolloacks.

Don't mock it, I've already heard someone has approached Bloodaxe ;) with 100 Poems to Help You Die: Your Complete Aid to Assisted Deaths.

"When Time, or soon or late, shall bring
The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead ..."

I've led poetry workshops in mental hospitals and in community groups of adults with learning difficulties. In both settings I've found people who write poetry, but who wouldn't call themselves poets. The closest I've come to finding a connection between poetry and mental illness was meeting a teenager with Asberger's syndrome, who wrote wonderful words - pages of them. He didn't seem to have an internal 'editor'. A haiku exercise produced an A4 page. However, I did think that he and I were accessing the same deep pool of inspiration. It was just that I could control it, but he couldn't.

And on the age thing, I'm nearly 66, and I hope I've inherited my mother's genes - she's approaching 90, fit, and in full possession of her marbles.

I'm sure that poems are good for your health. I'm sure they regulate inner rhythms - a quick peruse of Wallflowers by Michael Donaghy will confirm this - and their pattern and sound soothe the tortured breast etc. Futhermore, every person who has read a poem and thought: "My God! That's how I've felt about this all along and never knew how to express it!" or even, "never knew I felt it!" has been brought, by that poem, a little further from the brink of insanity. Or, you know, read Don Juan, or Wendy Cope, or Christopher Logue, and laughed.

Having said which, there is something convincing about the danger of habitual proximity and ease of access to the unconscious, pace Hughes, Paterson et al., as if the unconscious was a cliff - and maybe it is. But lots of crazy people have instant access to it all the time and never write a line.

I'd also posit this: that if you are one of those people who have this easy access to your own soft underside and feel the urge to write poems, and you don't write them, it probably won't do you much good either. So you might as well write them.

I think Chris is right: dentists do have a high suicide rate, poor ducks.