Briefing for a Descent into Hell is a psychological novel by British novelist Doris Lessing.

[1] The novel begins when a well-dressed but dishevelled man is found wandering alone at night on London's Embankment.

Unable to remember anything, he is escorted to a psychiatric hospital, where he is identified as Charles Watkins, a professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge.

An example of what Lessing called "inner space fiction", the novel contrasts Watkins's fantastical accounts of his own semi-mystical hallucinations – including being adrift on a raft in the Atlantic and flying through outer space – with the doctors' and nurses' increasingly draconian attempts to sedate and "cure" the patient.

[3][4] In a largely negative review in The New York Times, Joan Didion described the novel's grappling with questions of sanity and insanity as "less than astonishing stuff".