A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

people estimate themselves as more likely to experience positive events than their peers.

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

As with Martin Luther King, Gandhi’s nonviolent method sought to achieve psychological, not just political, ends.

The politics of radical empathy,

Taylor had discovered “positive illusion”—the opposite of depressive realism, a kind of healthy illusion found not just in a trivial button-pushing test, but in life-threatening illness.

Karl Jaspers made empathy central to psychiatry, a revolutionary idea at the time.

Twice, before he was 13, he tried to commit suicide.

That is, the psychologically healthier patients were the most unrealistic.

Three-fourths of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world will disappear if we step into the shoes of our adversaries and understand their standpoint.