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Originally Posted by Lush
The book hints at the notion that he was originally faced with the death of his wife and was not able to overcome it, leading to his despair to snowball into the disaster that eventually found him looking into the palantir, slowly deteriorating, losing Boromir after sending him on the road to ostensibly rescue Gondor, and ending up about to burn his remaining family member to death.
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I can see this in Denethor too. Interestingly it only becomes clear that he was once a great man and had already been hit hard by grief when we get to the Appendices and read about his background there; in the story we meet him when he is grieving for Boromir and this is when he is at his lowest point.
I like the way that Tolkien leaves it open to us to decide how much his mind has been affected either by grief or by using the Palantir. I find that as I have got older, I have grown to understand Denethor much better and rather than seeing him as simply a 'bad guy' for his madness, I understand how he came to that point, burdened by grief that he could not reconcile, and along the way hurting not just his younger son but his people.