Two famous writers with severe mental illness have recorded some of their anguish, even horror, at their illness and at its treatment, in their poetry. 

Spike Milligan

Known and loved around the world for his zany Goon Show scripts, and his hilarious books about his WW2 experiences as an infantryman in Tunisia and Italy, this famous comedian suffered greatly from mental illness, in his case manic depression, for which he was hospitalised several times. In 1972 he published a small book of serious poems titled “Small dreams of a Scorpion”.

Milligan is often claimed to be an Australian, partly as his mother lived in Woy Woy, just to the north of Sydney. In fact he was born in India, and educated there and in England. 

Manic Depression 

The pain is too much

A thousand grim winters

            grow in my head.

In my ears

            the sound of

            the coming dead.

All seasons

All sane

All living

All pain.

No opiate to lock still

            my senses.

Only left,

            the body locked tenses.

 (St Luke’s Hospital Psychiatric Wing 1953/4)

 

Oberon

 The flowers in my garden

            grow down.

Their colour is pain

Their fragrance sorrow.

Into my eyes grow their roots

            feeling for tears

To nourish the black

            hopeless rose

            within me.

 

(Nervous breakdown Bournemouth February 1967)

Milligan reduced millions of people to tears…of laughter…every week for years, but few in his audience had the compassion to cry for him. This next poem can be taken as light or dark…depending on the reader’s mood:

The future 

The young boy stood looking up the road

to the future. In the distance both sides

appeared to converge together. “That

is due to perspective, when you reach

there the road is as wide as it is here’,

said an old wise man. The young

boy set off on the road, but,

as he went on both sides of the

road converged until he could

go no further. He returned to ask

the old man what to do, but

the old man was dead.

 

Consider: Do creative people have a higher incidence of psychiatric illness? Why?

 

Francis Webb 

‘The decrepit persistent folly within this place

Will sow with itself the last paddock of space.’

 

Francis Webb, poet and dramatist with a special interest in mental illness and its therapy, was born in Adelaide in 1925 and died in 1973. He joined the RAAF in 1943 but never saw active service, being not old enough. In 1953 in England he was hospitalised several times for ‘mental illness’…and also wrote his best poetry, according to some critics. His sequence ‘Electric’ from 1961 takes on the foremost debate in psychiatry of his time: that surrounding electroconvulsive therapy. In ‘Ward Two’ (1964) he recounts his stay in a Parramatta psychiatric unit. He shows an interest the semi-barbaric pneumo-encephalograph, and the psychiatric attitude to homosexuality.

He won the Grace Leven prize with his 1948 drama ‘A drum for Ben Boyd’ (a character from the history of the Eden area). 

from the Prologue to Electric (1961) 

Again, the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and thirty-three.

We give you a little group of men and women,

Politically obsolete,

In white robes; long faces; always rather tired-looking;

Vocational smile- but real in the teeth of that tiredness:

Is it priest or nun we give you? with the thin confessional

            and cell

To contain the most daring contemplation of all?

No, but something of their diligence, fear, joy

Moves these dedicated men and women

Whatever their creeds, these mental doctors, nurses.

They are caught up in the arms of man- but man created free

Between good and evil.

Much of earth and beyond is unfolded before their eyes,

Of moonlight and pang of birth, death, love, the song,

Pain and transfiguration, mere life, peace and war.

They will know daily the athlete, the rhetorician,

The deceiver, the deceived,

The aged, helpless, the dumb and motionless.

 

(…)

 

To induce convulsion in man, with therapeutic aim,

By means of electric shock, that is the notion

Announced by Verletti and Bini in nineteen thirty-seven

To a world with no time to waste on such grotesque things.

  

from Ward Two : Old timer 

Isolate the Identity, clasp its dwindling head.

Your birth was again the birth of the All,

The Enemy: he treads rods, lumbers through pastures,

Musters the squeaking horde of the countless dead.

To guard your spark borrow the jungle art

Of this hospital yard, stamp calico vestures

For H.M. Government, for your funeral;

And in this moment of beads let nothing start

Old rages leaping in the dying heart.

 

from Ward Two: Ward Two and the Kookaburra 

(…)

Or, friends, had each of you somehow jerked ajar

The quantum portal, like a star

Erupting into sleep’s non-magnetic field?

 

(…)

 

Our menial hands and trouserlegs sweep in the brief

Gesture, the Fixed Idea; or time’s complaint

Flutters in this air pocket like a leaf.

Arms, legs of man and colour crawl aslant

Unpausing, but the head

Of obsessed ultimate laughter in ascent

Bulges into testament!

Gape at your porridge, munch it like a god! 

 

Consider: Webb’s attitude to doctors and their therapies seems quite positive, for some commentators as out of step with his time as his poetry.

The other side of the coin (electrode?) is perhaps most famously represented by Thomas Szasz in his book ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’. Szasz was a famed New York psychiatrist, and if you are interested in medicine and the mind this simple, well written book is well worth the time. You may even want to look at his ‘Schizophrenia: The sacred symbol of psychiatry’. 

from ‘To a Doctor’ 

No image yet: it is a universe,

Travail of every satellite living thing.

Your charges know the wan flypaper course

Of hygienic time, past beckoning

Of shopfront, woodland: spirit glued and writhing

With regular meals, good decent sensible clothing,

Wise comment from a seemly distance. Bring

Grace to this world, to all the world, and sing.

 

References and Further Reading 

Milligan S (1972) Small dreams of a Scorpion   Penguin

Szasz T (1960; 1974) The Myth of Mental Illness   Harper and Row

Szasz T (1976) Schizophrenia, the Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry    Syracuse UP

Webb F (1969) Collected Poems   Angus and Robertson