Stricken by a Divine Madness ; His Poems Are Revered Worldwide - but Jim Mcbeth Discovers Robert Burns May Have Written Them While Struggling with Lifelong Depression
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Summary
IN his despair, the man responsible for penning some of the most beautiful poetry in both Scots and English cried out with words no less lyrical than his rhymes: 'Here I sit... a damn'd melange of fretfulness and melancholy; not enough of one to rouse me to passion; not enough of the other to repose me in torpor - my soul flowering and fluttering round her tenement, like a wild finch caught amid the horrors of winter and newly thrust into a cage.' It was December 1793. Robert Burns was in extremis after a lifetime of debilitating mental illness, the years of headaches, faints, night 'suffocation', panic attacks and alcohol hastening the poet to his death two and a half years later.
'Canst thou minister to a mind diseased?' pleads Burns, during one serious bout of what he called his 'vexation melancholy' - which a modern psychiatrist would diagnose as a serious depressive illness with elements of anxiety disorder.See the full content of this document
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Stricken by a Divine Madness ; His Poems Are Revered Worldwide - but Jim Mcbeth Discovers Robert Burns May Have Written Them While Struggling with Lifelong Depression
Today, he would be prescribed a course of medication and cognitive behavioural therapy, which would restore his mental equilibrium within weeks.
In the 18th century, however, there was no such help.Few who admire the beauty of Ae Fond Kiss, the scathing wit of Holy Willie's Prayer, or the egalitarian sentiment of A Man's a Man For A' That, realise that, in the truest sense of the phrase, Burns suffered for his art.The largely unknown aspect of his life is revealed in a new biog...See the full content of this document
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