Of the many modern philosophers and theoreticians of madness (RD Laing, Erving Goffman, Foucault, Lacan, Thomas Szasz, Oliver Sacks), a few run that same risk - for all their rigour or righteous indignation, they remain outsiders looking in. The risk with less informed texts - where good intentions stand in for hard knowledge - is that they exoticise and even sanctify mental distress. The day is full of cracks and holes'), creates its own kind of truth. And since the turn of the last century, we've had Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Anne Sexton's poems, Tom Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Peter Shaffer's Equus and Clare Allan's novel Poppy Shakespeare, while Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections has a memorable sequence on a dementia-sufferer hallucinating turds.įictional or otherwise, a book such as Dutch novelist J Bernlef's Out of Mind, in which an intelligent man tries to make sense of losing his senses ('Everything happens in jolts and jerks. John Clare's asylum poems and Hopkins's 'terrible' sonnets (with their 'cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed') are brilliant evocations of the dark and fractured mind. There are mad scenes in Shakespeare: Lear, 'cut to the brains' as a tempest rages through him, poor Ophelia 'divided from herself and her fair judgment'. Frenzy and mania are integral to ancient Greek drama: Dionysus, Medea, Electra, the Furies. Imaginative literature has been resourceful in filling that gap.

But you don't really remember the details, the quality of suffering.' As Norah Vincent explains it halfway through her book: 'You know you felt terrible, and you know you don't want to feel that way again.

No wonder mental distress remains a black hole. The other difficulty is recall: even those eager to describe their experiences may find they have been zapped by medication or lost for lack of a writing implement (the pen is an instrument of self-harm, literally as well as metaphorically, and ballpoints are banned from most psych wards). To own up to mental illness is to invite suspicion, prejudice and discrimination even the kinder labels - patient and survivor, say, rather than loony or headcase - carry a stigma. Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father's Memoir of Love and Madnessįirst-hand accounts of breakdown and depression were until recently something of a rarity, for obvious reasons.

Voluntary Madness by Norah Vincent