Brain Storms: The Best Books on Madness
“In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.”
— Dante
From time immemorial, man’s struggle with madness has run through art “like a durable thread of woe.” as William Styron put it in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. From Sophocles to Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky to Kesey, writers have sought to properly evoke “the drowned mind’s appalling phantasmagoria.” Styron cites Dante’s infernal wood as literature’s most faithful metaphor for madness, but in 2023, mental illness is no longer confined to the realm of metaphor. Today’s best seller lists are rife with first person accounts of depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and trauma.
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