THE FUSE

Paul Schreber—who would probably be voted the most popular psychiatric patient of all time, if such a category existed—was a German judge who died in 1911. That was eight years after he fired his lawyer, represented himself, and won his own release from a lifetime commitment to an asylum called Sonnenstein. Schreber wrote a memoir, translated into English as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which includes the stunning documents he filed with the Dresden court.