Mad Pride: a Celebration of Mad Culture
ed Ted Curtis, Robert Dellar, Esther Leslie and Ben Watson
(Spare Change Books, £7.95)

HAMLET: Ay, marry, why was he sent into England?

FIRST CLOWN: Why, because he was mad; he shall recover his wits there; or, if he do not, 'tis no great matter there.

"It is important to get inside the heads of the mad," said Roy Porter in Mind Forg'd Manacles, his study of the treatment of the insane in Restoration to Regency England. "For one thing, their thought-worlds throw down a challenge... for another, if we are to understand the treatment of the mad, we must not only listen to pillars of society... their charges must be allowed a right of reply."

And here it is: an anthology of 24 authors describing their internal condition, the treatments they've been put on, and how they have (or have not) coped. From the blurb: "Mad Pride is set to become the first great civil liberties movement of the 21st century. Sick of discrimination, marginalisation, medication and being treated like shit, psychiatric patients are preparing to rise from the ghettos and make the world a fit place to live in."

The introduction points out: "This book is published at a time when the British government is proposing to enact one of the most despicable and shocking threats to civil liberties in living memory," in which Jack Straw promises to save us from all the loonies by locking them up before they've even done anything wrong. ("We are all born mad," said Beckett; "some of us remain so.")

The surprising thing about this book is how compelling it is. Real madness, I thought, was not that interesting; and one of its most depressing attributes is the tendency of the mad to write any old thing, at ostentatious length. A pathological condition is mistaken for insight. But, in context - that is, in a book written largely by the mad, and not as some hopeful manuscript landing on the desk of a reputable publisher - the pieces work.

I do not want to single any out in particular - for one thing, I have no desire to be pestered by someone who thinks that this book has been noticed because he or she set fire to a photo of Aleister Crowley in a laundry cupboard of Friern Barnet Hospital - but the life stories of these people are affecting despite the second-hand nature of their hallucinations. There is an anomalously large number of bus drivers represented here, which has made my bus journeys more interesting, I can tell you. There is even a contributor from Elsinore.

So I can't quite recommend this book as literature; for that you'd want to read Gogol's Diary of a Madman. But it does something that I have not seen literature do for a while: it gives a section of society (or, rather, a sectioned society) a voice which we can hear and listen to, if we choose.

Meanwhile, think on one of the verses from Robert Burton's Frontispiece to The Anatomy of Melancholy:

But see the Madman rage downe right

With furious lookes, a gastly sight.

Naked in chaines bound doth he lye,

And roares amaine he knows not why?

Observe him, for as in a glasse,

Thine angry portraiture it was.

His picture keepe still in thy praesence,

Twixt him and thee, ther's no difference.