Suicidal tendencies

Christine Kenneally in the Boston Globe:

HIGH INTELLIGENCE is often associated with the kind of dramatic unhappiness that leads people to suicide. Think Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, or the notoriously high suicide rates of doctors.

Last month, however, the British Medical Journal published a study that suggested a very different picture. In one of the largest studies on suicide ever conducted, researchers found that men with especially low scores on intelligence tests are two to three times more likely than others to kill themselves…

The study also suggested a complicated relationship between IQ, suicide, and education. Men with low IQ scores and only a primary education were no more likely to kill themselves than men with high IQ scores and a higher level of education. But men with low IQ scores and higher education were at a greater risk of suicide. And men with low IQ scores and highly educated parents were at the highest risk of all.

More here.