Going Nuts

Source: Warner Brothers

Last week I had dinner with my old friend, Randy Nesse, who runs the Evolution and Human Adaptation Program at the University of Michigan. He's taken a year off to write a book on evolutionary psychiatry -- which could include everything from schizophrenia to autism, anxiety to low mood. As Randy and his great collaborator, George Williams, once pointed out, mental illness, like physical illness, may be symptomatic of a body's defects. Or it might be symptomatic of a body's ability to adapt -- to retreat, rethink and retrench, after a loss.

Thinking about all that reminded me of a few mentally unsettled people I've read about over the last few weeks. On 10 February, a day before Hosni Mubarak resigned his office, a retired Egyptian general called him "psychologically and mentally ill" in an Al Jazeera interview. And at the end of the same month, a contributing editor called Muammar Qaddafi a "nutcase" and a "mentally ill dictator" in one of The Nation's blogs. Some of that may be mudslinging: it's dirty to call somebody crazy. But some of it may be true. Losing one's grip on reality has something to do with losing one's grip on life.

Which reminded me of a few mentally unsettled people I've come across in the library, lately. As readers of Shakespeare's sonnets (say, #s 35, 36, 67 or 94) are aware, losing a lover can be disabling. And as readers of Darwiniana know, nothing is worse than losing a child. But losing a dictatorship must come close. Plenty of Caesars, Kaisers or Tsars have lost their minds after they lost their domains.

In the first histories ever put together, in the Hebrew BIble, the first king of Israel, Saul, had trouble with the Philistine army, and was emotionally distraught as a result. "Now the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him" (1 Samuel 16:14-15).

In the same way, after Julius Caesar beat his old buddy, Pompeius Magnus, on a field at Pharsalus in Greece: "What thoughts passed through his mind it would be hard to say; he looked beside himself and half crazed and seemed to have utterly forgotten that he was Pompey the Great. Slowly, and without a word to anyone, he walked off to his camp."

But my favorite cases are British. In the millennium since William the Bastard crossed the Channel and conquered his North Sea island, there have been 32 Norman kings of England. And at least 3 have been, at least for awhile, certifiably insane.

Less than 2 centuries after William the Conqueror, his fourth generation descendant, king John, met 25 barons on a spring day in a field at Runnymede, at conceded the Great Charter, or Magna Carta. For which he suffered. "Whilst lying sleepless that night in Windsor castle, his thoughts alarmed him much," one of his chroniclers wrote. John started to pine away; he wondered why he'd ever been born. He gnashed his teeth; he gnawed on tree limbs. "Lo!, he is not now a king, nor even a petty king, but a disgrace to kings; he had better be no king at all than be one of this kind. Behold a king without a kingdom, a lord without a domain; a worthless man and a king contemptible to his people. Alas! Wretched man, and slave of the lowest degree, to what a wretched state of slavery have you fallen? You have been a king, now you are the scum of the people; you have been the greatest, now you are the least. Nothing is more unfortunate than to have been fortunate."

Precisely 2 centuries after Magna Carta, another king of England routed the French at Agincourt. But that heroic Brit, Henry V, was dead in a few years; and his son, Henry VI, gave away everything but Calais. So Henry VI became uncommunicative and unresponsive, eccentric or -- some have suggested -- schizophrenic. In any event, he felt bad. When a delegation was sent by parliament, the official record reported: "They cowede gate noo answere ne signe, for no prayer ne desire, lamentable chere ne exhortation, ne eny thing of theim cowede do or sey, to theire grete sorowe and discomfort," and, undoubtedly, his.

Then in 1783, George III lost the American colonies. Half a dozen years later, he nearly lost his throne -- to his son. And for awhile, he seems to have lost his mind. Some thought this George a victim of the metabolic disorder, porphyria; others suggested he might have ingested too much arsenic. In any case, he had rheumatic pain, was lame, started losing his memory and babbled. "One day when George III was insane he heard that the Americans never had afternoon tea. This made him very obstinate and he invited them all to a compulsory tea party at Boston," joked 1066 and All That.

Not funny, he would have thought.