Best intentions

In his haunting account of a friend's life destroyed by schizophrenia, Jonathan Rosen examines our attitudes to mental illness

- DANYL MCLAUCHLAN

THE BEST MINDS: A Story of Friendship, Madness and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen (Allen Lane, $75 hb)

Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl, published in 1956 with its iconic opening verse, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness", became one of the defining literary works of the 1960s. It was dedicated to Carl Solomon, a poet Ginsberg met in a psychiatric hospital after Solomon suffered a nervous breakdown, and was diagnosed with depression and schizophrenia. Ginsberg's mother suffered from the same conditions.

Howl insists all this madness was caused by society: by the conformity of postwar consumer culture, by capitalism, religious repression, and Cold War politics. It's a theory of mental illness that became ubiquitous in the 60s and 70s. Michel Foucault - the most influential social scientist of the era - believed mental illnesses were social constructs, tools of disciplinary power and the carceral state; the doctors and institutions that claimed to cure them were actually causing them. Psychiatrist and bestselling author RD Laing explained that "what is widely regarded as mental illness is, in fact, a rational response to an irrational world".

"What we now call schizophrenia," Laing prophesied, "will come to be seen as a form of enlightenment." From this perspective, mental hospitals were prisons for society's most sensitive and creative souls, gulags where they were tortured for their non-conformity.