How Writing Saved My Life

March 20, 2000 (San Francisco) -- Six years ago, Vietnam veteran John Mulligan was a homeless "shopping cart soldier" in San Francisco's North Beach, a man wracked with flashbacks and numbed by post-traumatic stress disorder. But his life took a turn during a veteran's writing workshop conducted by noted author Maxine Hong Kingston.

At the first workshop, Mulligan wrote about a horrific scene from the war: his buddies turning their weapons on a water buffalo for fun, sport, and misplaced revenge. The blood, the noise, the sense of loss and waste were all there.

Mulligan, now a 49-year-old novelist, left the workshop so elated he was "whistling and skipping." In the following years, he repeatedly discovered that putting past horrors into words helped clear his mind and lift his spirits. "I had to face my demons," he says. "I was an empty shell walking around the street, and writing made me feel like I had a soul."

Souls may be beyond the reach of science, but many researchers echo Mulligan's conclusion: Writing about stressful events can be powerfully therapeutic for body and mind.

Confronting Dark Memories

Dozens of studies have found that most people, from grade-schoolers to nursing-home residents, med students to prisoners, feel happier and healthier after writing about deeply traumatic memories, says James Pennebaker, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas and leader or co-leader of many of the studies.

Pennebaker's interest in the potential of writing therapy was sparked by conversations with government polygraph operators. A criminal's heart rate and breathing, he learned, is much slower immediately after a confession than before. Since then, he's spent much of his career proving that we can all feel better after confronting the past through writing.

The effect isn't just emotional, Pennebaker says. One of his studies, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in April 1988, found that college students had more active T-lymphocyte cells, an indication of immune system stimulation, six weeks after writing about stressful events. Other studies have found that people tend to take fewer trips to the doctor, function better in day-to-day tasks, and score higher on tests of psychological well-being after such writing exercises, he says.

Writing Off Asthma and Arthritis

A new study, published in the April 14, 1999 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that expressive writing can even ease the symptoms of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.

Joshua Smyth, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at North Dakota State University, and colleagues asked 70 people with either asthma or rheumatoid arthritis to write about the most stressful event in their lives. The study participants wrote about their emotional pain for twenty minutes straight on three consecutive days. Another group of 37 patients wrote about their plans for the day.

Four months later, 47% of the group that wrote about past traumas showed significant improvement -- less pain and greater range of motion for the arthritis patients, increased lung capacity for the asthmatics -- while only 24% of the group that wrote about their daily activities showed such progress.