Irish poet Matthew Sweeney began Out of the Vortex (Radio 4) with the fact that poets are more likely to undergo a depressive illness than other people – 30 times more likely, in fact. It's because the unconscious drives poetry, he suggested, in his hypnotic lilt. Poetry, he continued, is all about "the jumps and sudden lurches that forge new connections, new ways of seeing".

His exploration of this terrain, which he called a "wild country", was done through poems, well known and less so, and with a stirring selection of voices. Sweeney read his own poems, one referring obliquely to his own experience of depression, and we heard readings of John Clare's last poem and Emily Dickinson ("could it be madness, this?").

But the highlight was an interview with Jean Binta Breeze and a chance to hear her perform her extraordinary poem Riddym Ravings. She spoke about living with schizophrenia since her early 20s, and the impact of recurrent breakdowns.

She can no longer read, she told Sweeney: "Since the last six or seven breakdowns, I can't do more than a paragraph." She can only write when well, weaving her experience of illness into her poems. Riddym Ravings, she explained, was influenced by times when she "used to listen to the radio and do anything the radio said".