Either we need to come to terms with a possibility that we are all in some ways a little bit mad, which is a cliche, or we need to consider a much more inclusive, less discriminating attitude towards experiences we do not share or understand.

We need something more, perhaps something transcendent and unconfined by  reason to grant some necessary meaning to our lives. That need seems to be something quite fundamentally human, whether or not we are considered mad.

Whether we are free from this empirical, objective sense does not detract from the feeling of being free to choose how to act in one way or another, or to choose to act or not to act.

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.

It was not the voices in themselves that prompted such anguish with disastrous consequences, but the disruption of something beyond, and something that might be considered innate and particularly human: a sense of self, of the privacy of the self, and a precarious notion of free will.