The Corpus Callosum

After Reading Music From Apartment 8
for John Stone, MD

When I started out in medicine,
before I married and before
I had written a single poem,
I read your poetry like a hiker
on a treacherous trail who finally
stops to rest and drink and admire
the view of snow-capped peaks.
Three decades later I imagine you,
ten years younger than my father
would be if bad genes, bad luck, and bad
doctoring hadn't killed him long ago.
Without a father to guide me north,
your poems were a compass
pointing toward a world
where doctors can be poets,
where the pulse of each line
begins with the heartbeat we hear
when we bend close to our patients.
I pray you, too, are drinking deep
from whatever stream brings you
to your knees, and I hope
you can hear my boots striding
behind yours, cracked from the heat,
covered with dust, both soles still strong.

Richard M. Berlin, MD
Richmond, Mass

This is not a review of the book, or his other work.  For a review of the book, see the article in Psychiatric Times.  While there, see the essay he wrote in 2001, about how he happened upon the subspecialty of poet-psychiatrist.


Naturally, his path from medicine to creativity was not a straight line.  There were lots of little offshoots. 

Is there an interesting tangent we can take, looking at the publicly available material here?

The book review in Psychiatric Times explains that the book consists of sixteen essays, many written by poets who are undergoing, of have undergone, some sort of psychiatric treatment.  Two themes emerge:

1) "The struggles of the impaired mind and troubled soul are not what make quality poetry. It is instead hard work guided by clarity and competence... Whether from pharmacology or psychotherapy, the essayists in Poets on Prozac often find new precision through treatment."

This implies that, for the poets involved in the book, the treatment was helpful.

2) "Despite this largely unanimous appreciation of treatment in the book, a second, more subtle theme arises. Although the existence of illness may not define the poets, healing from illness is entwined with their paths as artists."

I have some comments on this.  First, despite the title, this is not a work about the effects of serotonin reuptake inhibitors upon the creative process.  The essayists received medication in some case, or psychotherapy, or both.  Second, it is most distinctly not a scientific study.  It was not randomized, it was not blind, and it was not controlled by placebo or anything else.  Thus, any conclusions we might draw are necessarily limited. 

It says nothing about what usually happens to the creative process when people undergo treatment, just what happened to a poet's dozen of individuals.  These are not typical patients.  Plus, the creative process involved in the writing of poetry may not represent the creative process in general.

Is it possible that some persons find that psychiatric treatment inhibits creativity; or, could it have both beneficial and deleterious effects, in some people?  Of course. 

I once attended a seminar about psychoanalytic psychotherapy, in which a case was mentioned of a creative person who had expressed a worry that therapy could diminish creativity.  One of the senior analysts rendered the pronouncement, that creativity that arises from untreated mental illness is not true creativity.  The idea there, is that psychoanalytic psychotherapy can only improve things.  As appealing as the notion is, it probably is incorrect. 

Over the years, I have seen some people complain about the dulling effect of medication, in particular.  Various kinds of emotional dulling can occur with any class of medication.  The complaints usually arise in persons taking mood stabilizers, or antidepressants, or sometimes antipsychotic medication.  Dulling also can occur with sedatives and opioids, although for some reasons people don't seem to complain about that as much.

We already know that different treatments do different things to different people.  Sometimes, the effects are positive, sometimes negative; often, the outcome is a mix of positives and negatives.  Nothing new there.  Still, it is nice to see that, for some persons, the positives clearly outweigh the negatives.