mental illness in literature

A revelatory look at how poet Allen Ginsberg transformed experiences of mental illness and madness into some of the most powerful and widely read poems of the twentieth century. Allen Ginsberg's 1956 poem "Howl" opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." Thirty years later, Ginsberg entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records which documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness. In Best Minds, psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student, examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric hospitalization, his mother's devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the post-war world and imaginatively transformed them.

"Explores how mental illness is portrayed in 21st-century young adult fiction and how selected works can help teachers, librarians, and mental health professionals to more effectively address the needs of students combating mental illness"--Amazon.

Provides critical examination of a range of texts, mostly fiction and film, which can be described as the literature of paranoia, fear, and alienation.

Presents a psychoanalytic study of the works of American author Kurt Vonnegut, examining his writings as tools by which he has attempted to work out the psychologically damaging events of his own life.