[On the Narrative about Vincent van Gogh's End of Life - Psychological Processes in his Letters]

This text presents a study that examines van Gogh's suicidality quantitatively content-analytically for the first time over the entire period of his correspondence using the program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC 2015). An index of variables was formed to capture suicidality in life stages. The results argue against the narrative about van Gogh's suicide and reinforce the assumption in recent research that his death was the result of an accident or homicide. The suicidality index developed in this study - once validated and in combination with other methods - could be relevant for diagnostics in medical psychology and forensic medicine.