Child Study Center Grand Rounds: "Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness"

Objectives:

• Recognize the impact of parental serious mental illness on children and families, including the burdens of family caregivers.
• Identify the limitations of psychiatric care in the mid-20th century including prolonged confinement and the disastrous use of lobotomy
• Explain approaches for humanizing madness through artistic witness

Needs assessment:

As a case study of one of the most famous artists in the mid–twentieth century to focus on madness, this talk explores the complex relationships between mental illness, psychiatry, trauma, poetry, and prophecy. It also provides historical insights into the paternalism, treatment failures, ethical lapses, and limitations of American psychiatry of the 1940s and 1950s.