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

A psychiatrist once told me, with alarming frankness, that “interpretation is hostile.” I think he was saying that not everyone wants their pain revealed and recorded. There’s a fine line between interpretation and hostility, between relating to someone else’s experience and appropriating it, between travel and transgression, inquiry and voyeurism.

I don’t see him, either within his own terms or within the psychiatric terms of the time, or today, as being in the least bit psychotic, or unhinged, or at any point on the verge of tipping over.

The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we kno

If the trauma is severe enough, a person may lose the capacity to concentrate on necessary goals. If that happens, the self is no longer in control. If the impairment is very severe, consciousness becomes random, and the person “loses his mind”—the various symptoms of mental disease take over. In less severe cases the threatened self survives, but