Everything You Wanted to Know About Crazy (But Forgot to Ask Your DJ): Deconstructing Crazy Part II

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SECOND THOUGHTS

In my first column about “deconstructing crazy,” writing as much as a social philosopher as a social psychiatrist, I explained that:

As a social philosopher, “crazy” offers an apparatus or tool to study how ideology takes root to colonize the popular imagination, creating hegemony with this fluid yet pernicious cultural category. I will define these key words. As a psychiatrist, “crazy” (and “insane” which may be more offensive) overlaps imperfectly with the subject of psychiatry. Schizophrenia, coined by Eugen Bleuler, MD, in 1908, is the medical psychiatric version of “crazy.” As the central psychiatric term of the 20th century, schizophrenia has been called “the sublime object of psychiatry.”¹

“Crazy, loony, twisted, psychotic, dangerous”—this is a view of psychiatry through one of the most important vehicles of culture in our time: popular music. Or, everything you wanted to know about crazy, but forgot to ask your DJ. This was inspired by philosopher and Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek’s book that uses Alfred Hitchcock’s films to illustrate Lacanian theory.²

So, let us play the “top 5 tunes” game so popular with musical magazines. Here are my top 5 tunes about “crazy” from my youth in the 1960s and 1970s, counting down:

5. “Psychotic Reaction” by The Count Five (1966). Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers have a wicked live cover version, available on YouTube. The song went from an instrumental to the song we know after the singer-composer John “Sean” Byrne heard a lecture about neurosis and psychosis in a health education class in college:

I feel depressed, I feel so bad

’Cause you're the best girl that I’ve ever had
I can’t get your love, I can’t get a fraction
Oh, little girl, psychotic reaction

Then the singer shouts, “And it feels like this,” followed by a psychedelic musical sequence that has been called a “rave-up” or “freak-out” with an accelerated rhythm to reflect his agitated mental state. Byrne probably never knew that the term was influenced by Adolf Meyer, MD, who named mental illnesses reactions, such as “anxiety reaction,” “depressive reaction,” and yes, “psychotic reaction”—all taken up in DSM-I (1952). The song, a one-hit wonder for the group, has been named seventh in the list of “50 Best Garage Rock Songs of All Time.” And so, pioneering psychiatrist Adolf Meyer lives on in the pop-music pantheon!

4. “Suicide Is Painless (M.A.S.H. Theme)” (1970). This song is from an award-winning movie and TV series, the anti-war “M.A.S.H.” set in the Korean war during the 1950s, directed by Robert Altman with music by Johnny Mandel. Altman, who commissioned the song, insisted on the title, referencing the faux suicide of a character, Captain “Painless Pole” Waldowski, and that it had to be the “stupidest song ever written,” sung at his mock funeral. When he could not write the lyrics himself, he asked his 15-year-old son, Michael, who knocked it off in 5 minutes! While Altman made $70,000 for directing the film, his son made more than $1 million for cowriting the song when it went to number 1! Now, that is crazy! Although it is satirical, both the film (1970) and TV versions (1972-1983) of “M.A.S.H.” had a very serious subtext about the craziness of war. It was very much like the existentialism of the 1950s except that instead of succumbing to despair, the “M.A.S.H.” characters who were battlefield surgeons resorted to humor as social criticism. They were constantly breaking rules to treat the soldiers—and not only on the American side. They showed the most positive view of psychiatry in movies or television until Judd Hirsch in the film “Ordinary People” (1980) and Kelsey Grammer in the “Frasier” TV series (1993-2004).

(Verse) The game of life is hard to play

I’m gonna lose it anyway

The losing card I’ll someday lay

So this is all I have to say

(Chorus) Suicide is painless,

It brings on many changes,

And I can take or leave it if I please

3. “Manic Depression” by Jimi Hendrix (1967). American musician Jimi Hendrix burst onto our consciousness out of the blue, a fully developed and confident master of the electric guitar. During the first night of his debut at the Bag O’Nails club in London, there was almost no one in the audience. The great session and band musicians who showed up the second night were stunned by the arrival of this prodigy. “Manic Depression” appeared on Hendrix’s first album, “Are You Experienced” (1967). One music critic expressed the opinion that it is about frustrated love (as Hendrix sings, “Manic depression is a frustrated mess”) more than a clinical disorder.

Yet, there are 2 things to say about that. First, frustrated love is often a trigger for adaptational problems and if the person has a diathesis for a mood disorder, it could trigger the mania or depression of bipolar disorder. Second, artists often give voice to popular expressions about mind, relations, and society. If not always technically accurate, they may capture a deeper truth with their metaphors about mental, relational, and social suffering.

Hendrix is a member of the infamous “27 club,” popular music stars who died at the youngish age of 27. This includes Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison of The Doors, and much later Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and later still, Amy Winehouse. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the American artist, also died at 27 and posthumously became the most commercially successful painter in US art history. Despite rumors, myths, and popular beliefs, there are no known specific health risks at the age of 27, while the lifestyle attached to fame and popular culture, above all the drug culture, is a major concern.

2. “19th Nervous Breakdown” by The Rolling Stones (1966). Founder and guitarist Brian Jones’ hypnotic riff is a tribute to Bo Diddley’s “Diddley’s Daddy.” Bill Wyman’s dive-bombing bass at the end is a classic that adds intensity and immediacy to the lyrics:

Well, it seems to me that you have seen
Too much in too few years
And though you try, you just can’t hide
Your eyes are edged with tears …

You better stop, look around
Here it comes, here it comes
Here it comes, here it comes

Here comes your 19^th nervous breakdown

Oh, who’s to blame, that girl’s just insane …

And it has a hook powerful enough to raise the Titanic—and rivals The Stones’ own monster hit, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” This song has some of the best lyrics in rock’n’roll. It represents a subgenre of rock’n’roll I call “rock sociology.” From Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child” to The Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and The Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home”—these are small portraits of personal predicaments, family failures, and social suffering.

1. “Help!” by The Beatles (1965). Therapists and helpers of every stripe refer to “help-seeking behavior” by people “reaching out for help.” Everybody interprets all kinds of aggressive and especially self-destructive behaviors as a “cry for help.” John Lennon, the founder of The Beatles, wrote “Help,” “I’m A Loser,” and “Nowhere Man” in 1965. Any hints about what was going in his life? Right from its title, “Help!” is a plea for understanding and comfort:

When I was younger so much younger than today

I never needed anybody’s help in any way

But now these days are gone, I’m not so self-assured

Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down

And I do appreciate your being ’round

Help me get my feet back on the ground

Won’t you please, please help me?

How The Beatles “Invented” My Generation

People say about the music of their youth that it forms the “soundtrack of their lives.” The late Yale literary critic Harold Bloom said that Shakespeare’s work represents “the invention of the human.”³ Musical producer and neuroscientist Daniel Levitan at McGill says the music “created human nature.”⁴

Now, of all the things I have read about The Beatles, no one has made this claim: listening to The Beatles throughout my childhood and adolescence, their songs created the registers of what I found pleasing musically and shaped my emotional reactions, especially concerning love and relationships. You could easily put together a story about the evolution of love from the first meeting (“I’ve Just Seen A Face”), falling in love (“Love Me Do”), and pleading for pleasure (“Please Please Me”) until marital bliss (“A Hard Day’s Night”) sets in, followed by love’s vicissitudes (“She Loves You,” “Girl”) and casual affairs (“Norwegian Wood”), until the end of the affair (“Yesterday,” “You Won’t See Me”). And we vicariously lived their only somewhat anonymous love affairs. Whoever triggered Paul McCartney’s adolescent desire to “hold your hand” may be lost in time, but we suspect that many of his early love songs were about his girlfriend Jane Asher. After his anonymous affair chronicled in “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” (1965), John Lennon sang about his love for Yoko Ono, starting with “The Ballad of John and Yoko” (1969) all the way to his final songs on “Double Fantasy” (1980).

Maybe human nature has to be reinvented or rediscovered in each epoch and in each culture. Their cultural impact was so great that we could say that The Beatles “invented” my generation. Harold Bloom’s claim is that for literate English speakers, our culture is so saturated with the work of Shakespeare that our language and the way we experience life is shaped by the cultural mythology that Shakespeare inherited, shaped into art, and passed on to the world in his plays and poems.³ Daniel Levitin argues that music allied with dance plugs into our neurological makeup “to enable the bonding and friendship necessary for society, science, and art to evolve.”⁴ It is likely that any great cultural achievement that reaches a receptive audience for an intense or prolonged time will similarly shape human emotions, language, attitudes, and cognitions.

Young Werther and Copycat Suicides in Europe

When I visited the Goethe House in Frankfurt, Germany recently, I took a deep dive into German Romanticism with the novel that made Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famous, The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1744. In the Sturm und Drung (“storm and stress”) style of German literature, it was a coming of age novel about unrequited love. Caught in the impasse of a love triangle, young Werther commits suicide. A large claim has been made that this novel triggered “copycat suicides” among the young gentlemen of 18th century Europe who dressed in Werther’s style. Although this has now been debunked, Goethe’s novel did have a significant cultural impact and with its later influence on Richard Wagner’s operas noted for the turbulence of their characters and melodramatic plots. This happens to be very relevant for psychiatry because the first major volume written about adolescence was by G. Stanley Hall in 1904, a psychologist at Clark University.⁵ Hall was taken by German ideas about Volk (the people as a collective) from Germanic culture and in particular, through his love of Wagner’s operas, Hall conceived of adolescence as a time of Sturm und Drung. And we have been saddled with the myth of adolescence as a time of turbulence ever since. (By the way, it was Hall who invited Professor Sigmund Freud, MD, to lecture at Clark University in spite of his well-known anti-Semitism.)

Crazy as Breakthrough

Popular music allows us to deconstruct the meanings of “crazy” today, from crazy as disappointment in love (Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and “I Fall To Pieces”), crazy love choices (“Girl” by John Lennon with The Beatles describing what we are tempted to call a toxic relationship if not a personality disorder), to “crazy as breakthrough.” The last notion is especially intriguing for psychiatry.

This is one of the more positive and popular myths about crazy. So popular that you can take your pick from many great songs called “Crazy.” I will highlight just 2. We can call this the romantic-mystical myth of mental illness, crazy as breakthrough to a more integrated, more honest, more authentic way of living. This was reflected in the pioneering British psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, MD’s works such as The Divided Self.⁶

In the opening lyrics of his international smash hit, “Crazy” (1990) British singer-songwriter Seal sings:

A man decides after seventy years

That what he goes there for is to unlock the door

It was inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall dividing East and West Germany and the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, both in 1989. The Soviet Union lasted 70 years, then suddently, the Berlin Wall just fell without a shot being fired. Seal is the son of a Nigerian mother and an Afro-Brazilian father and brings a “world music” sensibility to his songs:

In a sky full of people, only some want to fly
Isn’t that crazy

But we’re never gonna survive unless ...
We get a little crazy

The notion of breakthrough was reflected in The Doors signature song, “Break On Through” (1967):

You know the day destroys the night
Night divides the day
Tried to run
Tried to hide
Break on through to the other side

The band’s name was inspired by Aldous Huxley’s book on hallucinogens, The Doors of Perception, itself a reference to metaphysical English poet and divine William Blake.

In American Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” (2006), he sings:

I remember when

I remember, I remember when I lost my mind

There was something so pleasant about that place

Even your emotions have an echo in so much space

And when you’re out there without care

Yeah, I was out of touch

But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough

I just knew too much

Does that make me crazy?

Does that make me crazy?

Does that make me crazy?

Probably

This is somewhere between crazy as breakthrough, confession, and social commentary. This song has a funky, retro feel to it. I almost convinced myself it was a 1960s R&B/Motown cover. The music video uses an animated graphic of Rorschach inkblots as a perfect visual backdrop.“Come on now, who do you think you are?” the crazy person asks, “Well I think you’re crazy / Just like me.” And as crazy as “my heroes” who “had the heart to lose their lives out on a limb.” The song brilliantly incorporates the musical triplet notes into the lyrics, inviting us to rethink who is really crazy after all…

Who do you, who do you, who do you … think you are?

And Finally, “Just Plain Crazy”

In 2000, the Bahamian group, Baha Men unleashed a howling top 40 hit on an unsuspecting world. “Who Let The Dogs Out” is a visceral evocation of pure animalistic emotion. But wait, it is not completely crazy! It was actually based on a feminist critique of men who catcall women on the street. It is easy to imagine a woman walking down the street, being hassled by men, and asking, who let the dogs out?

Every song tells a story. If you listen closely and understand the meaning, it is not so “crazy” (or absurd or irrational or radical or delusional) after all. Just another way to get through life or, as John Lennon and Elton John put it in their hit single, “Whatever Gets You thru the Night” (1974).

Resources

To prepare for a deep dive into popular culture through music, I recommend reading 2 brilliant musicians, one who changed “modern song” and the other who changed how we understand “your brain on music”:

• Bob Dylan. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster (2022). See Chapter 51: “I’ve Always Been Crazy – Waylon Jennings.” Mr Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature (2016), both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song (2001), and 11 Grammy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award (1991), and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1988).
• Daniel J. Levitan. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Dutton/Penguin (2006), and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. Dutton/Penguin (2008). Dr Levitan is a musician, record producer, cognitive psychologist, and neuroscientist at McGill University. His achievements range from having produced platinum records by Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton, and Steely Dan, to being elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society of Canada.

Dr Di Nicola is a child psychiatrist, family psychotherapist, and philosopher in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he is professor of psychiatry & addiction medicine at the University of Montreal. He is also clinical professor of psychiatry & behavioral health at The George Washington University and president of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP). Dr Di Nicola has received numerous national and international awards, honorary professorships, and fellowships. Of note, Dr Di Nicola was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (FCAHS), given the Distinguished Service Award of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and is a Fellow-Elect of the American College of Psychiatrists (FACPsych). His work straddles psychiatry and psychotherapy on one side and philosophy and poetry on the other. Dr Di Nicola’s publications include: A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families and Therapy (WW Norton, 1997), Letters to a Young Therapist (Atropos Press, 2011, winner of a prize from the Quebec Psychiatric Association), and Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience (with D. Stoyanov; Springer Nature, 2021).

Acknowledgements

This new series on “deconstructing crazy” is based on my show idea and song list for an episode of “Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap” on CBC Radio which aired on January 9, 2011. Mr Bachman was the lead guitarist for the Canadian musical groups The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO). And here is a shout-out to my philosophy professors at the European Graduate School—Slavoj Žižek, Simon Critchley, and Avital Ronell, all also associated with New York University—who seamlessly integrate high and low culture.

References

1. Woods A. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory. Oxford University Press; 2011.

2. Žižek S, ed. Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). New & Expanded Edition; Verso Books, 2010.

3. Bloom H. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books; 1999.

4. Levitan DJ. The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. Dutton/Penguin; 2008.

5. Hall GS. Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. D. Appleton & Co; 1904.

6. Laing RD. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Tavistock Publications; 1960.