They became different, and two-thirds of them said they’d changed for the better.

illness. They both attempted suicide as teenagers, endured at least one depressive episode in midlife, and suffered a very severe depressive episode in their final years, before they were killed.

the researchers found that their unrealistically optimistic attitudes correlated with better psychological adjustment.

resilience—“good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development.”

Searching for a term less loaded than “normal” to describe these people, Grinker called them homoclites, a Latinate term he invented to indicate “those who follow a common rule.”

Germany and its Nazi leaders were not much different, psychologically, from any nation or any leaders. And that’s the scary part.

The politics of radical empathy,

The philosopher Karl Jaspers once said that how a man responds to failure determines who he will become.

that normal people who became ill and then recovered would return to their former worldviews.