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+--- Thread: Research Suicide, the music industry, and a call to action ("tortured artists") (/thread-17534.html)
Suicide, the music industry, and a call to action ("tortured artists") - C C - Mar 8, 2025
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1074991
INTRO: Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, country music singer Mindy McCready, Keith Flint of The Prodigy, Electronic Dance Music (EDM) DJ Avicii, K Pop stars Goo Hara, Sulli and Moonbin, and many more. This long and heartbreakingly incomplete list of musicians that have died by suicide represents not only tragedies, but cultural reminders of a devastating apparent connection between artists, mental health challenges, and early mortality.
New data published today in Frontiers in Public Health documents the prevalence of suicide among musicians and warrants serious concern. Occupational mortality data from the Office for National Statistics in England (2011-2015) demonstrates that ‘musicians, actors, and entertainers’ rank among the five occupational groups with highest suicide mortality.
Within the occupational classification of ‘culture, media, and sport’ occupations, these professionals exhibited the highest risk, with male suicide rates exceeding the population average by 20% and female rates surpassing it by 69%. Comparable patterns emerge in United States epidemiological data.
While the 2022 age-adjusted suicide mortality rate was 14.2 per 100,000 in the general population, male musicians, singers, and related workers demonstrated the third-highest occupational suicide rate at 138.7 per 100,000, preceded only by logging workers (161.1 per 100,000) and agricultural and food scientists (173.1 per 100,000). Among females, the occupational category 'Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports and Media', which encompasses musicians, recorded the highest suicide mortality rate across all occupational groups in 2012, 2015, and 2021.
This phenomenon also extends beyond Anglo-American contexts. Although occupational data specific to musicians and suicide mortality in South Korea remains limited, the confluence of highly publicized deaths among K-Pop performers and research examining suicide risk associated with socially-prescribed perfectionism suggests that musicians globally may constitute a vulnerable population requiring targeted intervention strategies.
Beyond the ‘tortured artist’ myth. Historical discourse surrounding musician suicide has often perpetuated problematic narratives: either normalizing these deaths as inevitable or mythologizing them within a romanticized framework of artistic suffering. There has been, at times, a deeply uncomfortable sensationalizing of suicide in the context of a music industry which is a storytelling, myth-making industry, and a story which can be traced all the way back to Plato is that artists are troubled, brooding, dark, mysterious, mad, and by extension, in extremis, perhaps, suicidal.
However, contemporary research on suicide risk factors reveals a more nuanced etiology. Multiple occupational and psychosocial stressors characteristic of music careers warrant examination, including exploitative industry practices, prevalent substance use disorders, financial instability, heightened social media exposure, performance-related anxiety, internal achievement pressure, and irregular sleep patterns.
Empirical evidence suggests that, beyond individual predisposition, these environmental and cultural factors significantly impact musicians' psychological well-being. Given our understanding of suicide risk factors, all of us who love and care about music should confront challenging questions about how we can change the culture of cultural professions. This necessitates moving beyond reductive narratives of artistic suffering toward evidence-based interventions that address systemic occupational stressors.
Therefore, in Frontiers in Public Health we have together outlined an approach to suicide prevention in the music industry which is supported by empirical evidence... (MORE - details, no ads)