Joseph Pilladi, chief statistician at the Institute for Creative Science, said more filmmakers die of suicide than writers of the same age and ethnic background.
"If a filmmaker tells you 'I'm going away for a while'," Pilladi said, "and says he'll be away for a very long time and not to expect him back any time soon, it's very reasonably for you to assume that he's going to film his own death."
With writers, the situation is much different, Pilladi said. Writers can't possibly write their own deaths, said Pilladi.
"As a writer is dying and becomes dead, in other words, that very moment when the life force disappears from the writer's body, the writer can't be writing. It would be physiologically impossible for the human hand to write about the death of the body to which that hand is attached."
Pilladi said the writer could write about symptoms of death, even part of the dying process itself, but not the entire death. When the writer finally dies, Pilladi said, the writer simply could not be writing.
"Therefore," said Pilladi, "Fewer writers die of suicide than do filmmakers."
