Was Kesey himself mentally ill (well - all those drug experiments…) or is it only the characters in “One Flew Over…” who are mentally ill?
This is actually an important book and, unlike nearly all books by the mentally ill, is a well-written and oddly gripping read. Freud was the first to make it famous. It’s written by a German judge who suffered a complete psychotic break, believing his organs had been stolen form him (a typical delusion amongst schizophrenics) and that the sun was sending him secret messages directly into his anus. The book was a huge influence on the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (“Capitalism and Schizophrenia”).
The writings of Antonin Artaud are another good example of well-written, influential work by someone classified as mentally ill. This poor bastard also suffered the worse kind of abuse by the psychiatric community of his time (the 1940s), subjected to hundreds of electro-shock treatments in a mere two-year period, a “treatment” that eventually killed him.
I can only imagine what Freud thought of that.
I can give you a bibliography of works by people who have been diagnosed “mentally ill” who write about the politics and social status of being so diagnosed, of user-run self-help groups, of advocacy for the rights of the psychiatrically labeled, and condemnations of the mental health system and forced treatment and whatnot. (Post or email if interested)
More in keeping with the theme of the thread so far: The Looney Bin Trip by Kate Millett; Too Much Anger, Too Many Fears by Janet Gotkin.
Oh, and read my web site! I’m one of “them” myself 
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
Haj
iirc, nietzsche was known to be as mad as a hatter and was in a mental hospital at time of his death.
Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies is fabulous.
Interesting. I knew about Freud’s connection with the work, but not the other influences. I’m curious as to how a work of unabashed schizophrenia becomes a philosophic influence.
On another note, it seems we’re seeing several categories of works here:
[ul]
[li]Works that are published specificaly because they are by the mentally ill writing about their illness. (e.g. “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,” Styron’s “Darkness Visible.”)[/li][li]Works by people complaining of their treatment for illness.[/li][li]Works that have little or nothing to do with mental illness but are by authors reputed to have problems. E.g. Twain, Hemingway. (When you consider the vast number of talented people who had problems, this is covering a pretty large swath of literature.)[/li][/ul]
BTW, is the obsessive making of list considered a problem?
Mark Vonnegut (son of Kurt, Jr.) wrote about his schizophrenia in a book called The Eden Express. I tried to read it once. Maybe I should be ashamed to say that the choppy writing style prevented me from getting past the first chapter, but that’s how it is.
I’m mildly surprised that no one’s linked to the thread I started today about Girl, Interrupted. So here it is!
Patty Duke’s book was Call Me Anna. It’s a good read, and she seems pretty insightful about herself. There’s an amusing anecdote towards the end that takes place after she had been stabilized with lithium. She was going off on Sean for something he did: just a typical mom tearing a misbehaving son a new one, and for a good reason. Mackenzie heard all the yelling and said, “Mom, did you forget to take your lithium?” 
I also liked When Rabbit Howls. It was made into a TV movie with Shelley Long as Truddi Chase. I saw it in a hotel with my parents. We turned it on just as it was starting, knowing nothing about the subject matter. So we sat there for two hours, fascinated but mystified: why was this woman acting so erratically all the time? Naturally it had to do with the abuse she suffered as a child, but who changes moods so abruptly and dramatically? I think that was the first time I’d ever heard of multiple personality disorder.
Jane Bowles, wife of author/composer Paul Bowles was mentally ill when she wrote most of her works (though supposedly her husband didn’t help matters).
William S. Burroughs son wrote two novels Speed and Kentucky Ham and he was most definately mentally ill. He eventually drank himself to death.
A Charge to Keep
George W. Bush,
Don’t forget the great Swedish playwright August Strindberg, who was psychotic at least part of the time. His plays and diaries do have a strong touch of the erratic and the bizarre (think of A Dream Play and Ghost Sonata); whether he wrote them that way because of his mental illness or whether he just wrote in an offbeat style because he was original and creative, I don’t know. But his book The Inferno is a personal account of his insanity. His play The Father is about a man who goes insane. Maybe Anniz could explain to us more about Strindberg.
Of the first 5 Americans to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, 4 of them (Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Lewis) were career alcoholics. Tells you something about the nature of the muse.
Howdy. I’m “one” too.
“An Unquiet Mind” A memoir of Moods and Madness, is written by Kay Redfield Jamison, a Professor of Psychiatry at the John Hopkins School of Medicine, and manic depressive. It was the first book I read after i myself was diagnosed bipolar. It’s fascinating.
I doubt sometimes whether
a quiet and unagitated life
would have suited me - yet I
sometimes long for it.
- BYRONIn the same vein as Brice Taylor (People who publish under delusion, without necessarily realizing they’re mentally ill): David Icke and Lyndon LaRouche.
Just wondering, who was the fifth non career alcoholic who won?
What-no mention of Anne Heche?
What about Sybil? Was it ever found whether or not she was a real person?
I read an article that said, yes, Sybil was a real person (I believe they even gave her real name although I can’t remeber it now) but that a lot of the story in the book was innacurate and Dr. Wilber’s diagnosis as dubious as a lot of other cases of multiple personality have proven to be.
Back around 1960, I read a Readers’ Digest condensed book about a schizophrenic and his family. He wrote a separate account of his own perceptions titled “The Cardboard Giants”. While I was Googling to verify it, I found this page of books all by former mental patients:
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/SommerR/htmAuto/library.htm
Some of the books already mentioned are on it.