One morning six years ago, Horatio Clare got out of bed and looked at the winter sunrise through a locked window. “You are,” he said aloud, “in a mental hospital under Section Two of the Mental Health Act.” A few days earlier, police had delivered Clare to this psychiatric facility in Yorkshire for his own good. “I was fully, psychotically delusional,” he recalls, “believing I was helping the security service and aliens to bring about world peace, and engaged to Kylie Minogue.”
Clare was suffering from cyclothymia (a type of bipolar disorder), seasonal affective disorder, alcohol issues, self-loathing and a relationship failing because he’d cheated on his partner. He’d also experienced a psychotic episode prompted by sleep deprivation and powerful weed. But, in the words of anti-psychiatrist RD Laing, remarkably not cited here given that they express so well Clare’s book philosophy: “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.”
