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.

Somebody told me, “Twitter hates tabloids, but Twitter is constantly acting like a tabloid, repeating the mistakes of the things we’re hoping to better.” Twitter wanted to become a more egalitarian justice system, but instead it became a draconian one.

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.

We want to see ourselves as curious and open-minded and smart and understanding things in terms of context and nuance, but when someone tries to do that in the midst of a shaming they're turned on.

But on the extremist side I didn't get any rejections at all. Everyone agreed to talk to me.

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.

There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.