A fascinating collection of 16 essays, as insightful as they are compulsively readable.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
All agree that the sick brain often spells catastrophe for the creative mind.
New York Times
The book shows that good poets also write vigorous, engaging prose. Richard Berlin has done a marvelous job of showing us how ordinary ... Read morepoets are; the selected poets have shown us that mental illness shares with other experiences a capacity to reveal our humanity.
Metapsychology
At once instructive and poignant, Poets on Prozac constitutes an important addition to the literature on creativity and mental illness... An illuminating read both for mental health professionals who work with creative people and for artists who are contemplating treatment options.
New England Journal of Medicine
This book belongs on the shelves of all therapists who treat women and men who immerse themselves in creative writing or any other fine art. Dr. Berlin's pithy introduction provides a useful summary of the relationship between creativity and emotional disorder. The 16 essays and the poetic excerpts that bolster them share the virtues of being heartfelt, accessible, and brief. They can be read by highly literate women and men, even those in the midst of an emotional maelstrom.
American Journal of Psychiatry
Each essayist (and the book as a whole) certainly has an audience, most faithfully in poets.
Roxanna Font
Bellevue Literary Review
This collection of brilliant essays does not resolve the relative contribution that medication (ranging from SSRIs to orthomolecular treatment) makes to the resolution of a creative person's fallow periods and blocks. Like the creative process itself, the picture that emerges is idiosyncratic and, perhaps, understood better as an appreciation than as analysis.
Choice
The book's claim to uniqueness lies chiefly in the character of the authors and the poetry with which they express their feelings.
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
In providing these poets with a voice in prose, Richard M. Berlin, himself both a healer and an artist, provides telling insights into both mental illness and the creative process.
Harvey Fenigsohn
Lamar Soutter Library Book Reviews
Endlessly fascinating.
Brooke Allen
Hudson Review
This collection of essays would be particularly useful to psychiatrists who have patients from the creative world of literature but I believe also from music, fine art or theatre.
British Journal of Psychiatry
Through the words of poets, this book celebrates the idea that health is not an end point-and that healing is a lifelong process.
Dagan Coppock, MD
Psychiatric Times
Show Less