Nicholas Hughes, 47, the son of revered poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has hanged himself at his home in Alaska.
According to family, Hughes had been suffering from depression for some time. Tragically, his mother, who also suffered from depression, committed suicide at the age of 30, when Hughes was an infant, gassing herself in their apartment.
Frieda Hughes, Nicolas’ sister, has written about her parents and her own battles with depression, indicating that the mental illness was not confined to just her mother.
According to CNN, a family friend dismissed the idea that Nicolas’s death fitted into a family trend.
“Nick wasn’t just the baby son of Plath and Hughes and it would be wrong to think of him as some kind of inevitably tragic figure,” said the unnamed friend.”
For more information and resources on depression, please visit Beliefnet’s Depression Page.