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.

If any light or hope can be found in this profoundly sad expression of the human predicament, it might be in the way that, as these determined and desperate acts of self-harm arise in some, they as mysteriously pass. I remain nevertheless haunted by the events I have described.

In a landmark study on homicide and suicide, it was observed that the lower social strata - due to chronic feelings of powerlessness - tended to project blame onto others and, therefore, were more prone to acts of homicide than suicide. By contrast, the more affluent classes - given their developed sense of self-efficacy - tended to internalise blame and, accordingly, were more inclined to commit suicide than homicide. Several studies have confirmed the aforementioned finding regarding the inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and homicide-suicide ratios.

The third symptom of power poisoning is selfishness. People who are puffed up with self-importance are prone to devote little attention to the burdens they inflict on others, and to care little about the plight of people with less privilege. In The Power Paradox, Dacher Keltner from the University of California at Berkeley shows that, in numerous studies—on everything from donating money, to teasing, to how much people talk, to negotiation strategies, to sharing cookies—when people lord over others or feel powerful and prestigious, they (1) focus more on satisfying their own needs, (2) focus less on others’ needs and behaviors, and (3) act as if the rules don’t apply to them.