Everybody’s got an opinion about Syd Barrett, and most of them are wrong. Mostly this is because there are a lot of misconceptions about mental illness -- the notion that there are things in the world that can literally drive a person insane, taking a healthy mind and laying waste to it, remains a popular trope in the public imagination. Somewhere along the line Syd Barrett did in fact go insane; of that there can be no doubt. As he slid from lucidity into what psychiatry describes as a state of “disorganization,” his friends and well-wishers did the interesting dance that people always do around the mentally ill, trying to lend a hand sometimes but maintaining understandable distances as the extent of Barrett’s difficulties became clearer and more pronounced. There are a number of ways one can tell this story. |