If symptoms do represent tentative steps to recovery, the elimination of these symptoms would not necessarily be helpful and would instead leave a void.

Acknowledging and affirming a person’s vivid experience and the struggle towards recovery - and simultaneously seeking to modulate or attenuate the intense distress and confusion that is part of the process - requires a difficult and time elusive balance.

This circus of cliches and caricatures affords vicarious pleasures but also does harm. It is seldom that we read textbooks or scientific articles to inform ourselves about mental illness. Intentionally or not, we become informed by accounts in literature and film and theatre.

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.

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.