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.

Perhaps especially in this divided and fractured country we need urgently to extend and complicate our lives by engaging with otherness, rather than retreating into familiar territories that can no longer be consoling: the precarious and absurd identities of race and nationality and normality or sanity.

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.

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 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.