Sylvia Plath’s Son Takes His Own Life: Is Suicide Hereditary?

News came this week (though it happened last week) of the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, son of famed poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. According to Frieda Hughes, the couple’s surviving daughter, her brother, who was 47 and a professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, had been battling depression for some time. But although his suicide may not have come as a shock to those who knew him and his personal sadness, it reverberated with a sickening familiarity when heard by those familiar with his parents’ lives — and it raises questions psychologists and researchers are still trying to answer, including the big one: is suicide a hereditary act?

Nicholas was just a baby when his mother Sylvia, despairing at the collapse of her marriage to future poet laurete Hughes, took her own life by means of gas oven while he and his sister slept in another room. She put towels under the door to insulate them from the fumes, and pinned her suicide note to the children’s pram. Six years later, his stepmother, the woman for whom Hughes had left Plath, killed herself and her four-year-old daughter, using the same method Plath had. Nicholas Hughes didn’t copy those earlier suicides — he hanged himself — but it’s impossible not to wonder how much his actions were influenced by theirs.

Ted Hughes weathered years of accusations and recriminations for his role in the deaths of his wives, and for how he treated their work after they died. But by all accounts he was a loving and protective father, and it can’t have been easy to raise a son left motherless so young, and so violently. He writes of how, after his mother’s death, the baby’s eyes:

Became wet jewels

The hardest substance of the purest pain

As I fed him in his high white chair.

Was it that “purest pain” that led, 46 years later, to another suicide? Or was it something genetic, a predisposition afflicting both mother and son, lying in wait? The science isn’t entirely clear, although for some gentic mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder, the suicide rate is approaching 20%. Some families have a vein of suicide running through them, and it can be hard to tease out which part is genetic and which part comes down as an emotional and historical birthright. But this much is certain: if you couple an inborn vulnerability with a life of such stunningly large losses as Hughes faced, his death is, sadly, not a surprise.