Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process
Starred Review. Beginning with the premise that "poets are among the most fearless of writers when it comes to self-revelation," poet and psychiatrist Berlin (How JFK Killed My Father) examines the ambiguous, age-old relationship between writing and madness by asking leading contemporary poets to discuss psychiatric treatment and their work. The result is a fascinating collection of 16 essays, as insightful as they are compulsively readable. Each is honest and sharply written, covering a range of issues (depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, psychosis, substance abuse or, in acutely deadpan Andrew Hudgins's case, "tics, twitches, allergies, tooth-grinding, acid reflux, migraines... and shingles") along with treatment methods, incorporating personal anecdotes and excerpts from poems and journals. Though they dwell in the darker corners of the creative process-frustration, anxiety, isolation-each contributor carries a measure of the joy Gwyneth Lewis felt at age seven, when she wrote her first poem: "This activity made me happier than anything I knew." It's a sentiment that both haunts and inspires: after 12 years without writing, medical doctor Jack Coulehan found in the "healing power of language" the key to lifting lifelong chronic anxiety. Medication is a trickier subject. Though it's an undisputable help, the difficulty in finding the right "cocktail" of pills and the array of side effects-for Chase Twitchell it turns off his "metaphor-making faculty" like a spigot-make it a painful challenge. Anyone affected by mental illness or intrigued by the question of its role in the arts should find this volume absorbing.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.