The Suicide Gene? – The Daily Beast
The shocking death of Sylvia Plath’s son Nicholas Hughes—who hanged himself last week, more than four decades after his mother took her own life—raises new questions about the genetic risks of suicide. Does it really run in families?
Hughes was still an infant when his mother committed suicide in 1963 by putting her head in a gas oven; he was seven when his father’s second wife, Assia Wevill, killed herself (and her four-year-old daughter) by exactly the same means. And 40 years later, on March 16, 2009, Hughes took his own life, hanging himself in his Alaska home.