It was almost 44 years ago now that Pink Floyd released what would become their best known and most influential work: The Dark Side of the Moon. The album stayed on Billboard’s top 200 chart for 15 years. By now, it has sold over 45 million copies, making it the album with the third highest number of sales. Ever. There were many special things about the album and it is without a doubt the biggest commercial and critical success of the progressive rock movement of the 1960s and 70s. The topics explored in the album provoked an existential introspection in the listener, droning on and on about the impermanence of life and arbitrary value of money, in tracks amply labeled ‘Time’ and ‘Money’. It explored polarization of the public in ‘Us and Them’ and commented on heaven without uttering a word with ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. But the most intimate and the least ‘direct’ message was delivered with the last two tracks of the album, the one-two-punch of ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Eclipse’.

Inspired by ex-band member Syd Barrett, whose abuse of psychoactive substances had (likely) led to his psychosis and ultimately the inability to perform with the band, the songs explore an aspect of the stigmatization of people with psychosis that is relevant as much, if not more, today as it was at the time of writing. The first of the two songs begins with familiar multi-instrumental sound of prog rock from the time. Behind the guitar, bass guitar, and cymbals, however, is the low pitched and quiet sound of a drum resembling the human heart beat. Curiously, this sound fades away as the vocals come in:

The lunatic is on the grass

The lunatic is on the grass

Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs

Got to keep the loonies on the path

Wasting no time on warming up, the lyrics jump straight into the message. The image that first pops into the listener’s head, reinforced by a repeat of the first line, is perhaps that of crazy people running around in the grass. Maybe they’re wearing old, smelly, worn out clothes and maybe they’re laughing and screaming at the things they see but aren’t there. As the listener starts settling into the image, however, in comes the third line and changes the image altogether. Now the narrator, and the existence of this narrator is revisited in the chorus, is remembering the games that he used to play as a child on the grass. ‘Got to keep the loonies on the path’ instantly swerves the listener around to the perspective from which it’s simple and absolute that the figure of authority is the one that is in the wrong here. Keeping children from not playing on the grass and instead on a paved path is criminal and this person is unforgivably cruel for committing such an act. It’s only the end of the first half of the first verse and the listener has already fallen into the trap.

The lunatic is in the hall

The lunatics are in my hall

The paper holds their folded faces to the floor

And every day the paper boy brings more

Here, the first two lines resemble the same structure as the first half of the verse but the second line pulls the listener out of their impersonality. The lunatics are now in the hall of the narrator’s house. This time they’re not children, however. The people that have their faces imprinted on newspapers are usually politicians, celebrities, and athletes. It’s famous people, the untouchables, the people we can’t reach. What makes these people insane? Why are they being called lunatics? They’re not. No one considers these people crazy. The aspect of insanity being highlighted in the second half of the verse is indeed the second half of insanity itself: the isolation. These people are not lunatics because they’ve lost touch with reality. They’re lunatics because we’ve lost touch with them. With this in mind, we’re taken through the chorus, ringing with a comforting undertone as the narrator exclaims to the listener that when everyone else abandons them, he will be there:

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon

And if there is no room on the hill

And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too

I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon

‘I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon’, says the narrator, if the preceding happens to you. The perils of insanity may haunt you far sooner than you had ever expected them to, if you had expected them at all. And in that instance, you may find solace on the hill. The hill refers to the Beatles song ‘Fool on the Hill’, a similarly themed song about a recluse who sees the world the way that it is but is disliked by the masses because of it and labeled eccentric and crazy by them. If there is no room on the hill, however, and your head seems to be exploding with the thoughts and the voices, with reality making less and less sense each and every day, you will find a friend in the narrator. The second verse continues:

The lunatic is in my head

The lunatic is in my head

You raise the blade, you make the change

You re-arrange me ‘til I’m sane

You lock the door

And throw away the key

There’s someone in my head

But it’s not me

The second verse reuses the structure of the first verse during its first half but abandons it completely for much smaller lines and without a break in the instrumentation for the second half. This is done to designate the second half of the second verse as separate from the rest of the verses. The structure of the line endings of the rest of the verses goes ‘the grass/the grass/ the hall/ my hall/ my head/ my head’, forming a perfect symmetry of impersonality-intimacy. After the lunatic is accepted as being in the narrator’s head and we are personally invested in his wellbeing, he explains that it is us who raise the blade and cut open his brain, playing around with him until we accept his behavior as sane. It was us who called the children loonies and forbade them from playing in the grass. This sets up the last half of the second verse as a cruel in-your-face reflection on what we, the listeners, have done. We isolate the lunatic and never look back. We pretend that the person in their head is no longer them, no longer a human being with emotions and thoughts. He has become a disease.

And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear

You shout and no one seems to hear

And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes

I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon

But if you, the person demonizing the lunatic and locking him away, treating him like a subhuman species, a heretic not to be interacted with, ever find that you hear things that aren’t there; if you shout and the pain in your voice reaches everyone’s ears but they ignore it; If your closest friends start leaving you out and playing songs you don’t know, you will find a friend in the narrator: the lunatic.

With the last chorus, additional background vocals add to the message being relayed. After ‘you shout and no one seems to hear’, a voice is heard screaming along to the music, while there is a distant ‘hey hey hey hey’ after ‘And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes’, an arrangement that sounds like it was borrowed from a completely different song and yet complements the music so well that it isn’t at all out of place. These background vocals serve to represent the harmony with which the lunatic and the sane man can exist.

The song does not end but rather morphs into the next track: ‘Eclipse’. This track leaves behind the personal investment of its predecessor and is written in an impersonal style, as if these are facts that the listener is being warned about:

All that you touch

And all that you see

All that you taste

All you feel

And all that you love

And all that you hate

All you distrust

All you save

All that you give

All that you deal

All that you buy

Beg, borrow or steal

And all you create

And all you destroy

And all that you do

And all that you say

And all that you eat

And everyone you meet

And all that you slight

And everyone you fight

And all that is now

And all that is gone

And all that’s to come

And everything under the sun is in tune

But the sun is eclipsed by the moon

Everything outside of the last two lines describes aspects of a person’s life. It explores their personality, character traits, preferences, and life events. These are the things that we think make a person who they are. Once we understand that as listeners, we are told that all of this is ‘in tune’ while it’s ‘under the sun’, referring to everything being alright when the times are good. But when the sun is eclipsed by the moon, you become a lunatic. Your whole world falls apart because of this one little detail. It overwhelms you and takes over your entire world (the way a total eclipse casts a shadow on all visible land nearby). And this is how you end up on the dark side of the moon.

The warning that this track gives off is not one of being afraid of lunacy/psychosis or treating it as some incurable, debilitating condition. The warning is that this may one day be you. And if you put yourself and your entire life in that position, maybe you will realize that in a time when everything falls apart, the one thing you expect is support. The one thing you really hope won’t happen is that you’ll be abandoned by friends and family. Brain Damage and Eclipse serve as an insight into the most debilitating aspect of psychosis: isolation. There is nothing worse, for a person whose illness cannot be seen or measured, than to be left alone, feeling unwanted and dehumanized in the process.

As the song ends and the instrumentation starts fading out, a subtle drum beat is heard once again. It resembles the beat at the beginning of ‘Brain Damage’ and as the instruments become silent, the beat gets louder. The heavily accented voice of a man rings out: ‘There is no dark side of the moon, really. (As a) matter of fact it’s all dark.’ These words, spoken over a drum beating like a heart, make one final statement. We’re all a little crazy. It’s part of being human.