THE publication last year of Steven M Weine’s Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness has reinvigorated enduring questions about the relationship between mental health and creativity. 

Weine frames “madness” as culturally ascribed, but “mental illness” as clinical. The latter is pathologised according to what Michel Foucault called the “clinical gaze” of society’s institutions. Its definitions are subject to ideological and technocratic shifts in those societies.

An example is the United States at the height of cold war paranoia and Jim Crow, and the civil rights, black nationalist and anti-war movements which were a direct rebuttal to a dehumanising politics. This was a society that pathologised “otherness.” A picture-perfect patriotic citizenry of White, middle-class, heterosexual, family oriented consumers was the norm. Deviations were viewed with suspicion. They represented a threat to be neutralised or, failing that, contained for the sake of the nation’s “integrity” and security.