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Going Crazy reads like a Who's Who in Madness, or better, a 384-page Time Magazine cover story on the subject. This is not surprising, because author Otto Friedrich is a senior editor at Time. He admits a bias against psychiatry, claims no expertise on “craziness,” and purposely uses this term because it is the least scientific and least amenable to rigid definition. “I can't explain it to you,” he says, “I can only show you a variety of scenes of what it looks like.”
Variety is certainly what we get. Personal tape-recorded accounts of breakdowns from Friedrich's friends and friends of friends, and a welter of stories of celebrities and personages in real life and fiction whose crackups have been described by themselves elsewhere or have been pieced together by Friedrich. Such accounts are, of course, as fascinating to read as they are often heart-rendering. Still, one feels a curious lack of compassion in this book. Friedrich, in his endless spectacle, wants— needs?—to show that “madness is part of all of us, all the time, that it comes and goes, waxes and wanes.” His definition is so broad as to include Norman Mailer, Joe Louis, George III, Jack London, Arthur Bremer, King Lear, Buzz Aldrin, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell (how did he miss Anne Sexton?), Lance Rentzel (where is Jimmy Piersall?), Jean Seberg, Scott Joplin, William Burroughs, Seymour Krim, Dostoyevsky, Eldridge Cleaver, James Forrestal, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Eagleton, Mark Vonnegut, Lenny Bruce, and nine million alcoholics. to name but a few. After talking with people who have gone crazy, Friedrich concludes that about one third were cured mainly by psychiatry, another third by drugs and vitamins, and probably more than a third “by just being left alone to work out their own problems.”
His final paragraph is typical of the smugness that informs this book:
I too have gone fairly crazy often, sometimes in ways that nobody ever suspected. I have never consulted the psychiatrists nor taken their drugs. But