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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator and my guest this week is my friend and fellow contributor Horatio Claire,

whose new book is called Heavy Light, A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing. Welcome,

Horatio. Very early on in this book, on page one, in fact, I think, you say, I went mad. And

that's, you know, a lot of people don't like to use that terminology.

There's, you know, people talk about having issues with mental health and it's seen sometimes as stigmatising.

Was there ever deliberate choice on your part to use that sort of blunt vocabulary?

Yes, it was. Absolutely. It's both personal and political.

I do feel that the road to very defined vocabulary is also a very difficult one.

It descends from the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders of the United States,

which itself is tied in with this fallacious 1950s, 60s theory that there is

a chemical imbalance in the brain. That was debunked, but psychiatry still depends on it to a certain

extent, in that the popular perception is that if there's something wrong with you, you can take a pill and fix it. I didn't find that that was helpful at all. And I'm much more

of the view that we all exist on a continuum between mad and sane. And I think madness is

an acceptable and normal part of every life. I think insomnia is a form of madness. I think those

moments of anxiety and panic, which we all know are forms of normal and perfectly reasonable madness,

I suppose. So when I went to the extreme end of the spectrum, that seemed to me to be the right

way to describe it. Can you describe a bit what the extreme end of the spectrum. That seemed to me to be the right way to describe it.

Can you describe a bit what the extreme end of the spectrum that you went through as you talk

about in the first part of your book consisted of? How did it manifest itself? It began in

hypomania, which is racing thoughts and sort of unable to sleep and too much energy and it progresses

into grandiose ideas and then it moved into delusion which was the full spectrum of madness really

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