Does Journalling Actually Improve Mental Health?

In the fall of 1962, Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother, “I am a genius of a writer, I have it in me. I am up at 5 writing the best poems of my life. They will make my name.” Before then, she’d struggled to find her voice, writing verse that was stiff and sometimes derivative, but in the months after her separation from husband Ted Hughes, she was able to let go and charge headlong in a new direction. These poems, which would be published posthumously under the title Ariel, were vivid, furious, and personal—like formal versions of some of the most memorable passages from the journals she’d kept for more than half her life.