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.

We are afraid of our own vulnerability. We are afraid of our being in part mere machines, things, bodies, and that fear is compounded by the knowledge that machines can, and often do, malfunction. This of course applies to any form of illness and is not confined to madness. It is understandable - surely not ridiculous and pathetic - and it is a reflection of a human fear of unavoidable death.

Being bound does not entail being confined. While there might be a tension or some uncertainty as to who or what is in control, I do know that I do not feel as if I am a function of an algorithm, and that this is irreducible and uncontestable, whether or not at some other level of analysis it is illusory.

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.