Was it the LSD or was it schizophrenia ?
My answer is it was the LSD.
Roger Waters said it's both. He claimed before the LSD there seemed to be something deep rooted with him.
shareBut Richard Wright said it was the LSD. He said Syd had been fine before he went missing for three days and when they tracked him down he " was someone else ". So it was a sudden thing.
LSD can reportedly cause severe worsening in the symptoms of schizophrenia, bipolar or schizoaffective disorder - and many people think that's what happened to Brian Wilson in the late 1960s.
The thing is, Barrett has been out of the public eye since his twenties, and is presumed to have some sort of disabling mental issues. Putting all the pieces together I'd guess schizophrenia or severe bipolar/schizoaffective, because: These diseases typically become symptomatic or severe in a person's twenties, and can be worsened by the kind of drugs that were popular at the time Barrett lost the plot. Sure, there have been reports of LSD causing permanent mental issues since that time period, but as I was alive then I don't know how accurate those reports were, because a lot of that was obvious fear-mongering, and there's the possibility that some people who had these symptoms had an underlying mental condition that was exacerbated by the drug.
So my guess is a serious mental illness worsened by hallucinogens, an illness that would have caused him huge problems no matter what he did.
People do describe him as being a bit "out there" well before his sudden fall into mental illness but I couldn't read any more into it than being a bit "out of left field" or a bit eccentric.
People with serious mental illnesses can begin to show mild symptoms before the disease becomes serious, a person with developing schizophrenia may appear eccentric, artistic, flat, or odd. Unusual speech patterns, rapid-fire speech, or a "flat affect" (blank facial expression) are secondary symptoms of schizophrenia, but then I'm not sure we're talking about schizophrenia anyway, there could have been some other disease that can have disabling mental symptoms.
And of course, none of the people being asked about Barrett's difficulties have any background in psychology, and may not have understood what they were seeing, or have any inclination at all to discuss the issue honestly and openly. Because they have no right to discuss someone else's medical issues honestly and openly, if the person in question doesn't want them to. So really, it's one of these questions where we'll never know the answer.
I've read up on it a few times and people seem to me to fall into either one of the two camps ( LSD vs Schizophrenia ) based on whether they think taking drugs is good or bad. The pro-drugs camp say it was schizophrenia and the anti-drugs camp say it was the LSD.
But you're right it is just speculation. The latest theory I heard was that Syd suffered from Asperger Syndrome just to complicate things further.
None of those issues are mutually exclusive - a person can have both schizophrenia and an autism spectrum disorder, and that person can take drugs!
And that's one of the reasons psychiatric disorders are so hard to diagnose, another is that the lines between one disorder and another can be very blurred. So it's hard enough for top professionals to diagnose someone with all the tools of the profession at their disposal, which means that a bunch of armchair psychologists working from rumor are definitely going to be wrong.
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Hard to say because we don't know if he was ever diagnosed with anything, but he most likely had schizophrenia or maybe another kind of severe mental illness, although doing a lot of acid could have exacerbated his symptoms.
shareI'm certainly no expert on the subject matter, but I would say "both" as well...I think Roger Waters was probably correct about that.
"Wish You Were Here"--what a great song. RIP, Syd Barrett.