Trying to prove you’re not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you’re not mentally ill,’ said Tony.

Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.

Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you're labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S.

I have thought sometimes that the sanest people, the people who are just very balanced, very happy, are probably lower achieving than other people. My kind of irrationality happens to be fear or anxiety.

Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don't know why, because they're not being paid.

Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?

Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.