While being in charge of the psychiatric hospital at La Borde, Félix Guattari allowed a patient to set up a circus on the grounds and enlist the talents of other patients. Acts included horses, snakes, and wild animals, all under large circus tents. Félix even put clown masks on his more catatonic patients, and only then did those patients respond to Félix's therapy. Guattari eventually lost his position for this and other shenanigans. (Source—warning: language alert.)

Gilles Deleuze couldn't type. You heard right: a guy who has been responsible for one of the most important post-structuralist critical texts of his generation had his buddy Michel Tournier type up all his manuscripts. The funny thing is that once the typing was complete and Gilles had received the finished copies, he couldn't remember exactly what he had hand-written, and he thought that Tournier might have taken the liberty to omit huge chunks of his words. Oops. (Source.)

Gilles Deleuze, a guy who spent so much of his intellectual energy discussing schizophrenic psychoanalysis, was scared to death of mental patients. He couldn't be near a mental hospital without getting really nervous. (Source.)