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.