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Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process
Author(s): M.D. Berlin, Richard M.
- Publisher: J. Hopkins Uni. Press
- Publication Date: 25 Mar. 2008
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 192 pages
- ISBN-10: 9780801888397
- ISBN-13: 9780801888397
Book Description
Honorable Mention, 2008 PROSE Award for Best Book in Psychology. Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers.
Poets on Prozac shatters the notion that madness fuels creativity by giving voice to contemporary poets who have battled myriad psychiatric disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse.
The sixteen essays collected here address many provocative questions: Does emotional distress inspire great work? Is artistry enhanced or diminished by mental illness? What effect does substance abuse have on esthetic vision? Do psychoactive medications impinge on ingenuity? Can treatment enhance inherent talents, or does relieving emotional pain shut off the creative process?
Featuring examples of each contributor’s poetry before, during, and after treatment, this original and thoughtful collection finally puts to rest the idea that a tortured soul is one’s finest muse.
Editorial Reviews
Review
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
All agree that the sick brain often spells catastrophe for the creative mind.
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At once instructive and poignant,
Poets on Prozac constitutes an important addition to the literature on creativity and mental illness . . . An illuminating read both for mental health professionals who work with creative people and for artists who are contemplating treatment options.--New England Journal of Medicine
Each essayist (and the book as a whole) certainly has an audience, most faithfully in poets.
--Roxanna Font,
Endlessly fascinating.
--Brooke Allen,
In providing these poets with a voice in prose, Richard M. Berlin, himself both a healer and an artist, provides telling insights into both mental illness and the creative process.
--Harvey Fenigsohn,
The book shows that good poets also write vigorous, engaging prose. Richard Berlin has done a marvelous job of showing us how ordinary poets are; the selected poets have shown us that mental illness shares with other experiences a capacity to reveal our humanity.
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The book's claim to uniqueness lies chiefly in the character of the authors and the poetry with which they express their feelings.
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This book belongs on the shelves of all therapists who treat women and men who immerse themselves in creative writing or any other fine art. Dr. Berlin's pithy introduction provides a useful summary of the relationship between creativity and emotional disorder. The 16 essays and the poetic excerpts that bolster them share the virtues of being heartfelt, accessible, and brief. They can be read by highly literate women and men, even those in the midst of an emotional maelstrom.
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This collection of brilliant essays does not resolve the relative contribution that medication (ranging from SSRIs to orthomolecular treatment) makes to the resolution of a creative person's fallow periods and blocks. Like the creative process itself, the picture that emerges is idiosyncratic and, perhaps, understood better as an appreciation than as analysis.
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This collection of essays would be particularly useful to psychiatrists who have patients from the creative world of literature but I believe also from music, fine art or theatre.
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Through the words of poets, this book celebrates the idea that health is not an end point--and that healing is a lifelong process.
--Dagan Coppock, MD,
About the Author
Richard M. Berlin, M.D., is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts, a psychiatrist in private practice, and a published poet. He writes a monthly poetry column for Psychiatric Times and is the author of How JFK Killed My Father, a collection of poems about illness and the healing arts.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Poets on Prozac
MENTAL ILLNESS, TREATMENT, and the CREATIVE PROCESS
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8018-8839-7
Contents
List of Contributors......................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments...........................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction, Richard M. Berlin...........................................................................................1ONE Dark Gifts, Gwyneth Lewis.............................................................................................13TWO The Desire to Think Clearly, J. D. Smith..............................................................................23THREE A Crab, an Eggplant, a Tree, a Goldfish, a Cow, an Apple, a Candle: A Therapist, Denise Duhamel.....................32FOUR Perfecting the Art of Falling, Thomas Krampf.........................................................................39FIVE My Name Is Not Alice, Ren Powell.....................................................................................51SIX My Oldest Voice, Jesse Millner........................................................................................60SEVEN How I Learned to Count to Four and Live with the Ghosts of Animals, Vanessa Haley...................................69EIGHT The Uses of Depression: The Way Around Is Through, David Budbill....................................................80NINE In the Middle of Life's Journey, Jack Coulehan.......................................................................92TEN Basic Heart: Depression and the Ordinary, Rene Ashley................................................................105ELEVEN Food for Thought, Caterina Eppolito................................................................................117TWELVE From Bog to Crystal, Barbara F. Lefcowitz..........................................................................129THIRTEEN In the Country of Motherhood, Martha Silano......................................................................139FOURTEEN Down the Tracks: Bruce Springsteen Sang to Me, Liza Porter.......................................................147FIFTEEN Chemical Zen, Andrew Hudgins......................................................................................161SIXTEEN Psychopharmacology and Its Discontents, Chase Twichell............................................................172About the Editor..........................................................................................................183Permissions...............................................................................................................184
Chapter One
DARK GIFTS GWYNETH LEWIS, DPhil
FOR THE FORTUNATELY UNINITIATED, it's difficult to comprehend how depression strips you of everything that makes you feel like a creative, contributing member of a family or society. After a severe episode of depression, which kept me home from work for most of a year, colleagues repeatedly asked me, "Were you writing?" For a good deal of my sick leave, I'd been unable to lift a pen, get out of bed, or speak for more than a minute or two. I lived without energy, sense of humor, charm, or any of the imaginative spark that makes the future look like a desirable place to inhabit. I became Woman in a Dressing Gown. At my worst, the duvet on my bed looked like a body bag and I was the corpse inside it.
So, no, I wasn't writing, but I was making mental notes. People who don't have depression are fond of commenting that many of its victims are gifted creatively, as if this made up for the sporadic visits to one's emotional underworld. When I'm well, writing is at the very center of my life and is a powerful force for health. To write, though, I have to be feeling happy, to have a surplus of vitality that allows me to be more alive and quicker than usual, see colors more vividly, hear rhythms more subtly, and have access to all my bodily sensations. In fact, I have to be in a state of hyperawareness that is the direct opposite of the half-life of depression.
Dylan Thomas described the condition of being a poet as walking over broken glass on your eyeballs. Since I was a child, I've lacked an emotional epidermis. This is good for writing-it means I can sense a lot-but bad for one's daily equilibrium. When I was young, my mother would try to "toughen" me up by mocking many of my childish raptures. This had the effect of making me ashamed of my most extreme esthetic reactions. Many years later, when I was a student at Columbia University's Graduate Writing Division, I nearly cried with relief to hear Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky warn a class of poets to "beware of the mockers." The last thing a poet needs is to be self-conscious about his or her reactions when they're already considered, let us say, unusual by conventional society. It took me years of therapy and poetic practice to unlearn the habit of self-censorship, particularly in the early stages of composing a poem, when I need to cast my net as widely as possible, without worrying if I'm upsetting anybody else with the material I'm catching. Anything unacceptable can, legitimately, be screened out at the editing stage, but if that full emotion isn't there in the first draft, the poem is very likely to be thin and uninteresting. It will have no subcutaneous fat.
I started writing poetry when I was seven. One rainy Easter holiday, I was bored, stuck inside the house. Suddenly, I started to compose a long rhyming narrative poem about the rain. This activity made me happier than anything I knew. The project of shaping the real world into a pattern that sounded beautiful thrilled me deeply and compensated, in a way, for the washout of a holiday. I showed this epic to my mother, who made corrections to the spelling. She was an English teacher, and this pattern continued for many years, until I learned not to show her my writing. Depression is shot like a dark thread through our family history. My grandmother took to her bed at a young age and used emotional manipulation to keep the rest of the family in line. I grew up observing my mother's crippling episodes, when she would take to her bed for days at a time and the rest of us had to creep around the house, careful not to set off her rage and despair.
Having learned how destructive depression can be, I was horrified to undergo a first episode in my early twenties. By then I had stopped writing altogether and was reading English at Cambridge University, a course of study guaranteed to make one feel creatively inadequate alongside Wordsworth, Keats, and other literary giants. I fell in with a sociable, rackety crowd and stopped studying. I now know that, for me, not writing is as unsafe as driving a car in the dark without headlights: I need to write to be fully conscious of my own life. I suffered a breakdown that led me to repeat my second year of studies, during which I began to realize that if I was to be well in the long term, I needed to rediscover the project of poetry on my own terms. I remember walking down Sidney Sussex Street and knowing that I desperately wanted to understand poetry and that to do so I would need to change my life. So began the long discipline of reading and internal discovery in which I am still engaged today.
After my final exams in Cambridge, I fled on a scholarship to the United States, where I was lucky enough to study with Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott,...
