Thomas Birdsey has schizophrenia. It's gritty and ugly. While sitting in the public library, he pulls out a knife and cuts off his right hand to atone for America's sins. That's the opening scene of Wally Lamb's emotional novel I know this much is true…

The experience of snapping into psychosis is easy to confuse with an awakening. In my case, that's how it first started. Going insane was a subtle process of insights. A few years had passed since the Great Recession, which I'm not sure ever ended for…

In July 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram set up an experiment that has since inspired others and become very famous. What he did was that he got participants, aka "teachers" to administer electric shocks to a group of "learners." He told the participants that they…

A lot of delusions come straight from the movies to you. To be fair, you need to borrow ideas from somewhere, so why not steal from the best? One show that had a massive influence on me during my second psychosis was Dollhouse by Joss…

While there are stories about people with schizophrenia, there's not much written by people with schizophrenia. It could be that few people recover to the point where they want to tell their story. Esme Weijun Wang's essays are an exception to this. In a lighthearted…

There's a famous experiment where two teams, one dressed in white and one dressed in black, pass a basketball. Participants count the number of times the team in white passes the ball. More than half of people fail to notice when a person in a…

A couple of months after my second psychosis, when the medication had settled in and I'd stopped drooling all the time, I started group therapy. The hospital arranged it as an IMR-course, which stands for illness management and recovery, and it helps you pave a…

Sir Isaac Newton is one of our greatest scientists to ever live. He promoted the empirical method, where ideas had to be tested for validity, and wrote the Principia Mathematica, which established classical mechanics. What is less well-known is that he struggled with mental illness,…

My mother tongue is Swedish, but since I started moving countries at the age of 16, I have lived most of my life in English. It's the language that's established my adult self. It's also the language in which I went insane. Before I woke…

For years I've been fascinated by lateral thinking as a way to solve problems by reasoning in a manner that is not immediately obvious. It involves ideas that may not be obtained by using traditional step-by-step logic. The term was first used in 1967 by…