We need to acknowledge the strange wonderfulness of these accounts, and the wonder of resilience in circumstances of extreme adversity, and the wonder, sometimes, of recovery.

How to process the escalating torrent of information available to us in a useful way is not clear, but the predicament is a way of imagining madness.

It is a curious paradox that schizophrenia might be imagined as a condition of being both less or too much of whomever we might be. An intricate balance is lost.

In this state all is noise and chaos and devoid of meaning. It is difficult to imagine: our lives are so much more made up of light and sound and thoughts and feelings that form meaningful patterns and which help us to make sense of our lives and may grant us pleasure. The patient experiencing a psychotic episode is robbed of these harmonies. We cannot know the mind of another, and certainly not the mind of a psychotic other, but we can imagine that such noise, such a dissolution of meaning, would be intolerable. In this context it becomes understandable that a person in such a state should urgently seek to find or construct meanings and, in this process, to employ themes that are culturally or spiritually familiar - albeit often in deeply strange ways, given the disorder of mind.

One critical step in this process is to re-imagine the symptom not merely as a sign of a pathological process but as an endeavour to find meaning and regain control. This would entail acknowledging rather than dismissing these often bewildering symptoms.