Stevan Weine, MD

The story of the legendary Beat poet’s involvement with madness and mental illness has never really been told—until now.

The very immediacy of the recent terrorist attacks makes the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder problematic since there is no distance of time or space from the event itself. How can clinicians deal with this shift to best treat patients?

The poet must remember that it is his poetry which bears the guilt for the vulgar prose of life, whereas the man of everyday life ought to know that the fruitlessness of art is due to his willingness to be unexacting and to the unseriousness of the concerns to his life. The individual must be answerable through and through: all of his constituent moments must not only fit next to each other in the temporal sequence of his life, but must also interpenetrate each other in the unity of guilt and answerability-M.M. Bakhtin, 1919

My Bosnian psychiatric colleagues reported to me that there was the usual adolescent stew of identity crisis among them: delinquency, drugs and sex; but also much, much more. I asked the students, "What do you suffer from?" Lack of opportunity was mentioned most often. A few said that they wanted someone to talk with when it all got to be too much. They welcomed the new school-based initiative of the adolescent mental health clinic in Sarajevo.