I don’t know if this is what pushed him over the edge, but still it is quite traumatic for me to watch this. A good childhood friend of my became psychotic in his teens and subsequently drank himself to death. In the ~2 years leading up to his psychosis he had started to use increasing amounts of weed, and just before his first real psychosis he had discovered psychedelics. In his case there’s no telling if the drugs were a consequence of the (latent) psychosis or the psychosis was a consequence of the drugs. There certainly was a genetic component to it, but I still have the feeling that the drugs made it way way way worse.
Back on topic: I don’t think this was ‘beginning of a brief creative period’. Afaik he wrote some of his best songs as a teenager, before he discovered drugs, and he probably wrote some more brilliant songs afterwards despite the troubles in his mind.
I’m a huge Syd Barrett fan, but I’ve never liked to watch this film snippet. The first time I saw it (I think I found it included on a bootleg cd-rom sometime in the late 90s) I was sad for the rest of the day.
