"When all is said and done, there was no reason for Lou not to graduate. He went to class and he was very smart," said Reed's friend Richard Mishkin, per Rolling Stone. Similarly, it is tempting to imagine that Reed's undeniable talent meant that achieving musical success was an inevitability — that, in a word, he had it easy. But by merely scratching the surface of his early life, we can see that Reed had much to contend with in terms of both his mental health and how his problems were dealt with using the treatments of the day.

Following Reed's death in 2013, many obituaries, including that in The Guardian, noted that Reed had been treated from the age of 11 with electroconvulsive therapy, a brutal procedure intended to alter the patient's brain chemistry which, per the Mayo Clinic, was originally performed without anesthetic. The New York Times describes how the therapy left Reed with a feeling of "incredible rage" towards his parents, who had reportedly sought treatment to combat Reed's adolescent anxiety, antisocial behavior, and, possibly, homosexual urges (though Reed's sister later denied this, per the same source).

The picture that emerges, in any case, is of Reed as a tortured youth, who, suffering mental health issues and the trauma of his treatment, turned to drugs at an early age; NME reports that, alongside marijuana and LSD, Reed began injecting heroin while still at university.

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